Bernhard Schreiber - The Men Behind Hitler
Bernhard Schreiber - The Men Behind Hitler
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Bernhard Schreiber was born in 1942 in Stuttgart after his father died in action as an officer of the Luftwaffe. After his education in Germany he studied journalism in America and travelled extensively as a freelance journalist. During the last five years he has been researching the material for this book and decided to publish the German Edition as a first result of his research. He will be continuing his research with colleagues. and he has received a grant from a large university for this purpose. When his work does not take him abroad he lives with his family in Germany
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
When I first heard of Bernhard Schreiber's work I was convinced that a work along these lines was needed in English. I met Mr. Schreiber and he consented to his work being translated and I am, in fact, indebted to him for his help in ensuring that his exact meaning was put into English. It is refreshing to work with an author who can cross check your translation. He has edited certain errors and improved the documents section which he felt was lacking in the original. My thanks to C.S. Carr for his assistance with the translation of the documents and to Miss P. Carter for the typing and retyping. H. R. Martindale
It is my desire that this book be distributed as widely as possible; and thus I hereby not only give my consent, but urge the distribution, translation, publication, reprinting and quoting of this book in part or in whole by any person, group or organisation that may wish to so do. Unfortunately my financial situation made it impossible to distribute this book as widely as I would have liked, and I hope that the step I have taken will inspire others to actively participate in this German warning to the world.
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THE AUTHOR
I have taken the liberty of scanning this book, and publishing it on the internet because, like the Author, I believe that it should be read and distributed by as many people as possible before it is too late. Having been involved with the setting up of the Eugenics Watch page I have seen many links which I have tried to highlight. I am sure there will be many that I have missed. I would also like to point out that I do not speak German, and any German words have had to be copied verbatim from a very imperfect copy of the original, and I would like to thank Dave Parry of Aberdeen for his help with translations and proof-reading. If (when) you find any mistakes I would appreciate if you would email me so that I can correct them.
Liz Toolan
DEDICATION
This book is humbly dedicated to the memory of countless ordinary people those men, women, children and babies of many races and beliefs, whose lives were taken because they were considered less than perfect and, therefore, unworthy to live. I hope that this small book will serve in its own way to keep their memory alive and that it will help to remind us all of the price we have to pay when extremists have the power to decide upon our right to live.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface Chapter 1 ............ Surplus People Chapter 2 ............ The Survival of the Fittest Chapter 3 ............ The Fhrer Appears Chapter 4 ............ The Secret Seizure of Power Chapter 5 ............ Useless Bread-gobblers Chapter 6 ............ The Death Machine Chapter 7 ............ The Psychiatric Final Solution to the Jewish Question Chapter 8 ............ The Phoenix Chapter 9 ............ The Same Old Tune Authors Note Bibliography Appendix
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PREFACE
This book began as an attempt on my part to gain an insight into certain missing or obscure chapters in the history of our country. Much has already been written, both here and abroad, many attempts made to identity the motives, but I have always felt that the whole story has never been told. As my inquiries and researches advanced, I began to realise that I had stumbled on something more significant than originally thought. Germany had not only victimised (and I will not attempt to absolve my country) but had itself become a victim of something far more dangerous and far-reaching than National Socialism, racialism or any other ism. Its foundations were laid in the early 20th century culminating during the period that Hitler set Europe ablaze and it used the insanity of war to disguise much of its activities. The post-war reforms served as a new cover, and the kernel of a fresh social onslaught lies waiting in several countries today. I discovered that the events in Germany were the background to a few notable facts concerning the 60s and 70s. It was at this point that I was forced to make a difficult decision. Obviously I had to make the story known to others to warn them, but should I wait until my research was complete (I had no way of knowing how much longer this might take) or should I now publish the facts I had so far collected? I decided on the latter course. But more work needs to be done, more evidence must be collected, and more must be written. Having revealed part of the truth I hope others will wish to find out more and make their findings known.
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Malthus
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was an English political economist and historian who in 1798 published a book called "An Essay on the Principle of Population". This document started a reaction against the earlier writings of Godwin, Condorcet and others, who reinforced the principles of emancipation and enlightenment which ensued after the French Revolution. Malthus' theories put forward here and in later works have a surprising influence even today. He proposed that poverty, and thereby also vice and misery, are unavoidable because population growth will always exceed food production. The checks on population growth were wars, famine, and diseases. Malthus proposed "sexual abstinence" for the working class as a means by which the population excess could be diminished and a balance achieved. In this way, the "lower" social classes were made totally responsible for social misery. This solution was based on the hypothesis that population increased in geometric progression (2, 4, 8,16, 32, 64, 128 and so on) while food production increased in arithmetic progression (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and so on). The situation already existing in his time would get worse, according to his claims and would reach alarming proportions. His basic idea can be shown pictorially in the following diagram.
Malthus was one of the earliest, but not the last, to turn away from the economic solutions of that period, and seek to solve social problems, such as poverty, through the use of biological measures. His premises, presented as facts and his figures with an air of mathematical authority, were impressive and convincing,
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although his ideas were based solely on some small travels and minor observations. However, despite the grand display and presentation, some of his critics realised the absurdity of it all. Both of the growth-rates were arbitrary, for there were no statistics on population increase or food production, before or during this time, which would have permitted a forecast for the future. Apart from this, no one knew lust how much land was actually cultivated or partially cultivated and how much was barren Malthus' presentations had the impact of a bomb; his mathematical and geometrical explanations and diagrams had a hypnotic effect, and only a few asked on what his claims were actually based. His theory has retained its persuasive power to such an extent that many of our present authorities use it as a basis of operation. Yet neither Malthus nor his later disciples ever managed to put forward any scientific proof for his theory, and in fact excellent scientists have at various times disproven Malthus' theory and the ideology resulting from it. However, with the book, Malthus created an atmosphere which not only prevented a real solution to the social problems, but also promoted the repressive legislation which worsened the conditions of the poor in England. It was reasoned that better conditions for the poor would only encourage them to further propagate, putting those who were capable of work at a disadvantage. Malthusianism then moved forward to achieve its greatest triumph in 1834 with a new law providing for the institution of workhouses for the poor, in which the sexes were strictly separated to curb the otherwise inevitable over-breeding. This type of thinking has an inherent devaluation of human life through fear that the ever increasing population of lower classes will devour the more civilised or "better" people. This kind of philosophy, of course, urged the calling forth of drastic measures to handle the problem. The first resurgence took place a hundred and fifty years after his death, resulting in the birth-control movement, a principle which is based on Malthusianism. Following the Second World War, the idea was again taken up and today receives new momentum in the "population explosion" campaigns.
Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin [1809-1882], English naturalist. After years of research work formulated in 1859 his theory of evolution in his book "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Race In the Struggle for Life". Without at that time going into a study of mankind, he tried to explain the development of life-forms in terms of a struggle for existence. The result of this struggle would be a natural selection of those species and races who were to triumph over those weaker ones who would perish. During his research he came across Malthus' essay and suddenly saw that his own theory could be expanded to include all life in the struggle for existence that would be inevitable if food production was to lag behind the growth-rate of the population. And so Darwin took over the false doctrine of Malthus and made it a cornerstone of his own theory. In 1871 he published his next large work entitled "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex" which was based on his earlier book but which dealt almost exclusively with man. In it he came to the reasonable conclusion that both in physical structure and physiological behaviour, there was no difference between man and other mammals. However, the idea that this was also applicable to mental and moral qualities, shows that he was on unsound ground. Although Darwin was an excellent naturalist, he was not a very good philosopher. In his attempt to explain the social development of Man as a struggle for existence and selection through natural means, he compounded the error that Malthus had made by yet another attempt to apply a biological solution to philosophical and social problems. Darwin's speculations, to be found in his "Notebook", that thought was a brain secretion, is completely without basis. Modern theories of evolution finally succeeded in clarifying this confusion by separating the development of man into two different steps, animal and psycho-social. Despite this, Darwin's theses and those of his followers have been very influential over a long period. They caused a significant shift in the social thinking of that time, the consequences of which can still be felt today.
Galton
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Francis Galton [1822-1911] was an English psychologist and a half-cousin of Darwin. Very erratic in his thought processes, he was unable to complete research in even one area. Hardly would he begin a research project before throwing out a theory and then move on to a new field leaving the proof of the theory to others. He was so fascinated with Darwin's theory, that he spent an unusually lengthy period of years trying to prove that mental abilities were hereditary. In 1869 he published his book "Hereditary Genius" and in 1883 "Enquiries into Human Faculty". In his "Enquiries" he undertook to transfer his hereditary theories from the individual to the whole race. Galton extended Darwin's theory of natural selection into a concept of deliberate social intervention, which he held to be the logical application of evolution to the human race. Galton was by no means satisfied to let evolution take its course freely. Having decided to improve the human race through selective breeding, brought about through social intervention, he developed a subject which he called "Eugenics", the principle of which was that by encouraging better human stock to breed and discouraging the reproduction of less desirable stock, the whole race could be improved.
Social Darwinism
The pseudo-science resulting from the fusion of Darwin's evolutionary theory with social and political theories. Charles Darwin was a very humane man, who probably would have been greatly enraged at the extremes to which his theories were taken. He had made a tragic error in attempting to extend the biological law of the struggle for survival to the social life of man. In so doing he played into the hands of "experts" of later generations, by giving them the impressive scientific justification for their barbaric actions of "natural selection", "preservation of favoured races" and the "struggle for life". It was passages of the following type in "The Descent of Man" that would have been most welcomed by them: "With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed." Social theories based on the "survival of the fittest" had been circulating before the publication of "Origin of Species", and even before Darwin himself. Herbert Spencer, a social theorist and scientist had already propounded the social implications of this theory some years before the appearance of Darwin's book: "The well-being of existing humanity, and the unfolding of it into this ultimate perfection, are both secured by the same beneficent, though severe discipline, to which the animate creation at large is subject; a discipline which is pitiless in the working out of good; a felicity- pursuing law which never swerves for the avoidance of partial and temporary suffering. The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong... are the decrees of a large far-seeing providence..." or, in plain language, the fittest survive. In a later edition of "Origin of Species", Darwin himself described Spenders "survival of the fittest" phrase as being more accurate than his own "natural selection". Finally, in Darwin's work the social theorists had found the scientific rationale that lent respectability to their arguments. This fusion came to be known as Social Darwinism, a movement that gained increasing
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momentum with its demands for social legislation in accordance with the principle of "the fittest must survive", and its effects were calamitous for later generations.
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Eugenics Societies
In 1901 Galton delivered a lecture to the English Royal Anthropological Society stressing the various possibilities of improving human breeding under the present social, legal and moral conditions. In 1904 the first chair in Eugenics and working society in Eugenics were instituted at University College, London, and these led to the establishment of the Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics in 1907. Soon Eugenics groups began to spring up all around the world. In 1908 the Eugenics Education Society (renamed the Eugenics Society in the 20's) was founded in England and in 1910 the Eugenic Record Office in the United States. Both institutes used the research results of the Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics to propose practical applications, and they made it their task to intensely propagandise the eugenic idea to the public. Dr. Alfred Ploetz, the same man who had assisted Schallmeyer with his prize essay, in 1905 founded the "Gesellschaft fr Rassenhygiene" [Society for Racial Hygiene] in Germany. Later it changed its name to "Gesellschaft fr Rassenhygiene (Eugenik)", which means the Society for Racial Hygiene (Eugenics). This change of name took place after Galton's announcement that racial hygiene and eugenics were in fact synonymous terms. These terms used in the German language were not only interchangeable, but racial hygiene was taken to be the German translation of eugenics. As racial hygiene was closely connected with political anthropology - a pseudo-science developed by Gobineau - eugenics was used as the scientific basis upon which racialist and political ideas, especially those of the Nazis, were based. In 1904 Dr. Alfred Ploetz founded the journal "Archiv fr Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie" [Archive for
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Racial and Social Biology] which after one year of existence became the official organ of the "Gesellschaft fr Rassenhygiene" [Society for Racial Hygiene], which Ploetz had created. A co-founder of this society was the later world-famous psychiatrist and racial hygienist, Professor Dr. Ernst Rdin.
Mental Hygiene
Clifford Beers, a former mental patient, campaigned heavily in America for better treatment of the mentally ill. A Swiss-German professor operating in America, Adolf Meyer, coined the term "Mental Hygiene". In 1908 the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene, the starting point of the Mental Hygiene movement as an organised body, was founded. Its aims were: improved treatment for the insane, and the safeguarding of the public's mental health. In the 1920's groups were formed in other countries-Canada, France, Belgium, England, Bulgaria, Denmark, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Russia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Australia. By 1930 twenty-four countries had Mental Hygiene Associations.
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Routinely these associations had as their medical specialists psychiatrists who espoused eugenic medicine and lay members who were simultaneously active in the Eugenics Societies which had by this time become very numerous. In France one of the leaders of mental hygiene was Dr. Edouard Toulouse, in Great Britain it was Miss Evelyn Fox, Secretary of the Central Association for Mental Welfare. She had been an active member of the Eugenics Society before the foundation of the National Council for Mental Hygiene, of which she was an officer and founder, and finally was recognised as leader of the Mental Hygiene movement as a whole. Among the board members of the National Council for Mental Hygiene was Sir Cyril Burt, who had been a member of the Eugenics Society for eleven years before the foundation of the National Council. Later he was founder of MENSA, a high l.Q. group which espouses eugenic principles. From the annual reports of the National Council for Mental Hygiene one can see many names that are also common in the Eugenics Society, including: Dr. E. Mapother- active Eugenicist Major Leonard Darwin - Officer of the Eugenics Society Dr. A. F. Tredgold - Psychiatric Member of the Eugenics Society Dr. Adolf Meyer - Member of the Eugenics Society. The Mental Hygiene movement drew strongly from the Eugenic movements of whatever country they were in, and in fact the Mental Hygiene Movements were permeated with Eugenic thought. In 1931 the publishing firm Walter de Gruyter and Co. published the "Handwrterbuch der Psychischen Hygiene und der Psychiatrischen Frsorge" [Handbook of Mental Hygiene and Psychiatric Care] as an official psychiatric reference work containing a high proportion of eugenically-oriented contributors. Frequent references are made throughout the book to Eugenics, Planned Marriages, Heredity, Degeneration, etc. and under the heading "mental hygiene" we find the following: "Therefore the hereditary constitution of a personality is the first and most effective point of prophylactic intervention: in the sense of eugenic psychiatry it is necessary to hinder unfavourable hereditary combinations and bring about favourable ones, and especially to prevent the propagation of the hereditary traits of physical illness and the socially inferior psychopathies." The principle that prevention of birth of the mentally-ill would eradicate mental illness became an operating principle for every mental hygiene group in the world. In Germany, as in other countries, the theoreticians and practitioners of Mental Hygiene recruited mainly from eugenically oriented groups. Among them was the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, a close friend of Dr. Alfred Ploetz and Dr. Ernst Rdin, Professor of Psychiatry at Munich University, co-editor with Ploetz of the "Archiv for Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie" and co-founder of the Gesellschaft fr Rassenhygiene (Eugenik) [Society for Racial Hygiene (Eugenics)]. In 1933 the Nazi Reichsminister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, nominated Rdin as his honorary representative on the board of directors of two German racial hygiene unions. It is even more significant that Rdin was appointed by Frick to work together with the Ministry in the reconstruction of the German race. On the occasion of Rdin's 65th birthday, Ploetz honoured his achievements in the Archiv fr Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie: "so just recently he received the Goethe Medal for Art and Science from the Fhrer `in recognition of his achievements in the development of German Racial Hygiene.' The Reichsminister of the Interior Dr. Frick sent him the following telegram: `To the indefatigable champion of racial hygiene and meritorious pioneer of the racial-hygienic measures of the Third Reich I send my sincerest congratulations on his 65th birthday. May you be granted many more years to continue your research for the welfare of mankind'
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The Congress of German Psychiatrists, Neurologists and Internists at Wiesbaden awarded him the Heredity Medal." Also Dr. Luxenburger, a well known racial hygienist and colleague of Rdin's in the Genealogical Department of the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt fr Psychiatrie (German Research Institute for Psychiatry) at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Munich, and Dr. W. Wlassack, racial-hygienist and exponent of the Swiss Mental Hygiene movement, both mental hygiene theorists with a racial hygienic background. These extreme views were not, however, limited to German Psychiatrists and Racial Hygienists. In the following examples an Englishman and Swiss Frenchman are representative of this type of thinking in other nations. The English eugenicist Karl Pearson, first Professor for Eugenics at London University, published his thoughts at the turn of the century: "This dependence of progress on the survival of the fitter race, terribly black as it may seem to some of you, gives the struggle for existence its redeeming features; it is the fiery crucible out of which comes the finer metal. [When wars cease] mankind will no longer progress [for] there will be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock; the relentless law of heredity will not be controlled and guided by natural selection." and also "History shows me one way and one way only, in which a high state of civilisation has been produced, namely the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. If men want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves." In his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain quoted the Swiss professor August Forel with great admiration and approval: "Professor August Forel, the well-known psychiatrist, has made interesting studies in the United States and the West Indian Islands, on the victory of intellectually inferior races over higher ones because of their greater virility. `Though the brain of the Negro is weaker than that of the white, yet his generative power and the predominance of his qualities in the descendants are all greater than those of the whites. The white race isolates itself (therefore) from them more and more strictly, not only in sexual but in all relations, because it has at last recognised that crossing means its own destruction'. Forel shows by numerous examples how impossible it is for the Negro to assimilate our civilisation more than skin-deep, and how so soon as he is left to himself he everywhere degenerates into the `most absolute primitive African savagery'. (For more detail on this subject, see the interesting book of Hesketh Pritchard, `Where Black Rules White', Hayti, 1900; any one who has been reared on phrases of the equality of mankind, etc., will shudder when he learns how matters really stand so soon as the blacks in a State get the upper hand). And Forel, who as a scientist is educated in the dogma of the one, everywhere equal, humanity, comes to the conclusion: `Even for their own good the blacks must be treated as what they are, an absolutely subordinate, inferior, lower type of men, incapable themselves of culture. That must once for all be clearly and openly stated'. (See the account of his journey in Harden's `Zukunft', February 17, 1900)".
Sterilisation
Eugenics had been formulated and made known by Galton in 1883. During the following years the subject was popularised and shortly after the turn of the century eugenic organisations were set up throughout the world. The movement attracted an increasing number of supporters and adherents particularly in America and Germany. And to the extent that the organisations grew, they enlarged their sphere of political
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influence. The legislation of various countries started to orient itself to eugenic principles and parliaments began to enact many new laws of a purely eugenic nature. Although they varied in form and execution, they all were aimed at the same objective - the mentally deficient and the mentally ill. Laws of a general nature provided for the establishment of institutions and colonies, enabling the mentally deficient or mentally ill to be segregated from the rest of the population, thus facilitating the control and prohibition of the procreation of the insane. Two such laws were Great Britain's Mental Deficiency Act, passed in 1913 and the South African Mental Disorders Act, passed in 1916. Other laws were much more definite and aimed directly at the sterilisation of the insane. It should be noted here that the term "sterilisation" in the legislation of many American States includes castration and hundreds of such emasculations have already been carried out. An examination of the dates of this legislation in the case of America shows it to have occurred in two waves. The first one began with the passing of a sterilisation law in Pennsylvania in 1905, which the Governor immediately vetoed. However, other states followed this example and had more success. This first wave reached its peak in 1913, and then declined soon after [the War probably taking attention off domestic matters to some extent], and little activity can be traced until 1920. At this point it would appear that the pure eugenically-inspired "push" exhausted itself. However, with the growth of the mental hygiene movement [starting in 1908 in Connecticut and spreading throughout the world in the 1920's] a second more vigorous phase was entered. The Mental Health movement in each country became the primary lobbyist for the Eugenic cause, frequently doing the front-line work of the Eugenics movements and generally acting as an authoritative pressure group with the result that eugenic principles began to appear again in legislation. Gaining momentum throughout the 20's a second wave of enactments and amendments passed through the legislatures under the combined pressure of the interlocking eugenic and mental hygiene movements. By 1929 this had also reached its peak in America but with the added influence of the more broadly-based mental hygiene movement the surge continued throughout other parts of the world. As a result many countries had passed or were considering the passage of laws providing for compulsory and occasionally voluntary sterilisation of the mentally ill or defective, alcoholic, or socially undesirable. Amongst these were Germany, Australia (various states), New Zealand, Canada (various provinces), Finland, Sweden and many of the American states. In addition Norway, Sweden and Switzerland included castration in their measures. In 1932 the Minister of Health in England set up a committee to look into the whole question and the findings were published in 1936. However no law was passed probably because the public after seeing first-hand the glorious achievements of a eugenically and racially based state in Nazi Germany would have raised a tremendous outcry. With no popular support and often considerable opposition at the best of times it proved more difficult to get laws passed after 1935. As the original supposed purpose of the mental hygiene movement was improved care of the mentally ill, it is strikingly odd that the first laws passed on an international basis at the instigation of the mental hygiene movement were laws to sterilise the mentally ill and prevent them from reproducing.
Euthanasia
While the whole world was being prepared by propaganda tot the sterilisation of the insane the adherent of mental hygiene and eugenics were preparing their next step. Euthanasia by definition means an easy death. It is usually understood that it should be in a painless peaceful fashion for someone who is incurable and dying. It is also known as "mercy-killing". In 1895 Alfred Ploetz had, as we have seen, introduced Social Darwinism into Germany and founded Racial Hygiene. In his book "Fundamental Outline of Racial Hygiene" he calls for the elimination of counter-selective processes i.e. those processes which eliminate the strong and favour the weak. Amongst
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these he includes war and the protection of the weak and the ill. As an illustration he gives the example of a newly married couple who give birth to a weak or malformed child who would be given an easy death with a small dose of morphine by a Board of Doctors. In 1922 Karl Binding a Jurist and Alfred Hoche a psychiatrist wrote: "The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value". (Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens). They argued in favour of euthanasia that the unfortunate are a burden to themselves and society and their parting would cause no great loss, the cost of keeping these useless people was excessive and that the State could better spend the money on more productive issues. They felt that the physically and mentally defective should be painlessly eliminated and demanded the nullification of the religious and legal barriers which stood in the way. Hoche was an influential, authoritative psychiatrist and argued that the moral attitudes towards the preservation of life would soon drop away and the destruction of useless lives would become a necessity for the survival of society. At a German medical conference in Karlsruhe in 1921 a proposal was put forward for the legalisation of Euthanasia but was rejected. At a psychiatric congress in Dresden in 1922 the same motion and report that had been presented in Karlsruhe was brought up again and again rejected. At about the same time the Monist League [one of its founders was Ernst Haeckel convinced supporter of Social Darwinism] made a similar suggestion to the Reichstag again without success. In the U.S.A. Dr. Alexis Carrel a FrenchAmerican Nobel Prize winner who had been on the staff of the Rockefeller Institute since its inception published his book "Man the Unknown" in 1935 its message cannot be said to have been limited to home consumption for within three years it had been translated into nine other languages. In his last chapter "The Remaking of Man", Carrel repeatedly looks to Eugenics as the solution to the ills of society. He suggests the removal of the mentally ill and the criminal by small euthanasia institutions which were to be equipped with suitable gases: "There remains the unsolved problem of the immense number of defectives and criminals. They are an enormous burden for the part of the population that has remained normal. As already pointed out, gigantic sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane asylums and protect the public against gangsters and lunatics. Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? The abnormal prevent the development of the normal. This fact must be squarely faced. Why should society not dispose of the criminals and the insane in a more economical manner? We cannot go on trying to separate the responsible from the irresponsible, punish the guilty, spare those who although having committed a crime, are thought to be morally innocent. We are not capable of judging men. However the community must be protected against troublesome and dangerous elements. How can this be done? Certainly not by building larger and more comfortable prisons, just as real health will not be promoted by larger and more scientific hospitals. In Germany the Government has taken energetic measures against the multiplication of inferior types, the insane and criminals. The ideal solution would be to eliminate all such individuals as soon as they proved dangerous. Criminality and insanity can be prevented only by a better knowledge of man, by eugenics, by changes in education and in social conditions. Meanwhile criminals have to be dealt with effectively. Perhaps prisons should be abolished. They could be replaced by smaller and less expensive institutions. The conditioning of petty criminals with the whip or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in hospital would probably suffice to insure order. Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts. Modern society should not hesitate to organise itself with reference to the normal individual. Philosophical systems and sentimental prejudices must give way before such a necessity. The development of human personality is the ultimate purpose of civilisation."
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Reichswehr and was recruited and inducted as an infantryman in August 1914. At the end of the war he returned from a military hospital to his regiment in Munich where he performed various menial tasks. In June 1919 he received political indoctrination in "national thinking" at Munich University from the Educational or Propaganda Department of a local Group Headquarters of the Bavarian Reichswehr. During the course his fanaticism and vehemence attracted the attention of the organisers who recruited him as a V-man (someone charged with special assignments). Shortly after this, in July, he was made a member of an Enlightenment Commando for the Lechfeld transit camp, whose duty it was to organise psycho-political instruction for the returning soldiers in anti-socialist, national thinking, while at the same time being a training ground for the Commando personnel themselves in agitation and public speaking. In addition to his psycho-political duties he also performed the task of being a confidential agent and spy for the Group H.Q. which was keeping a careful watch on local political groups. To accomplish this, Hitler was instructed to attend meetings of the tiny German Workers Party (D.A.P.). At first he was bored with the meetings, but as he continued to attend and was enrolled as a member, his interest increased steadily, and his involvement and activities grew. At a public meeting in February 1920 he announced the twenty-five point party programme and about this time the name of the party was changed to the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) known in its more familiar form as the Nazi Party. Released from the army in March 1920 he threw himself wholeheartedly into party activity and proceeded to make a bid for the leadership in which he was successful. In 1921 he went to Berlin in order to give a speech there to the ultra-conservative National Club, and here established the first contacts with industrialists and business circles. During the following years these increased to an ever-widening circle of supporters including Fritz Thyssen, Alfred Hugenberg (newspapers), Alfred Krupp (heavy industry), and others. There is also some evidence for the belief that Hitler visited Switzerland during the summer of 1923 in order to receive financial support. Also in 1923 the abortive Munich Putsch, staged by Hitler, carried his name for the first time beyond the borders of Germany and earned him a short term in Landsberg prison, where with the assistance of Rudolf Hess he wrote "Mein Kampf". As an excellent illustration of the degree of his absorption of Social Darwinism, eugenic and racial ideas it makes fascinating, if turgid, reading. Here we meet the familiar arguments of these three groups; the merciless struggle of all life forms; the victory of the strong over the weak; the ruthless disregard for the rights of others; the Jewish menace; the advocacy of techniques for breeding of superior citizens, and so on. Upon his release from prison in December 1924 Hitler busied himself with re-asserting his control over the party. Successes followed over the next few years and, despite various setbacks and difficulties, the seizure of power came in the year 1933.
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science, that his posterity would suffer from serious physical or mental hereditary disease. (2) Persons would be considered as hereditarily diseased in the sense of this law if they suffered from any one of the following diseases: (i) Innate mental deficiency (ii) Schizophrenia (iii) Manic-depressive insanity (iv) Hereditary epilepsy (v) Hereditary (Huntington's) chorea (vi) Hereditary blindness (vii) Hereditary deafness (viii) Severe hereditary physical abnormality. (3) Further persons could be sterilised who suffered from severe alcoholism. The law provided for an application from the person seeking to be sterilised and if he were unfit to act or declared incapable of managing his affairs on account of mental deficiency or not yet completed his 18th year, the legal representative was entitled to apply. Sterilisation could also be applied for by the official doctor or, in the case of an inmate of a hospital sanatorium nursing home, or prison, by the head of the Institution. A whole legal system was set up. Courts for the prevention of hereditary illnesses were instituted called "Erbgesundheitsgerichte" (Hereditary Health Courts) and attached to the existing district courts as well as the Higher Courts. Sitting on these were always one judge and two doctors (usually psychiatrists) present in court hearings of this nature. Witnesses and specialists could be called upon and the rules for civil procedure were to be normally applied. The Act went on to order that if the Court finally decided on sterilisation it should be carried out even against the person's will, provided that the application had not originated from him alone. The official doctor had to request the police to take the necessary measures. If other methods proved of no avail the application of force was permissible. In his book "Into the Darkness - Nazi Germany Today", Lothrop Stoddard, an American Social Darwinist, Racist and pro-Nazi had the following comments to make after a visit to Germany where he had looked into socialised health and the eugenic courts. He states that in a conversation with an earnest young man who was officially in charge of the tuberculosis section of the public health service headquarters, he was told that: The treatment given a tuberculosis patient is partly determined by his social worth. If he is a valuable citizen and his case is curable no expense is spared. If he is adjudged incurable he is kept comfortable of course but no special effort is made to prolong slightly an existence which will benefit neither the community nor himself. Germany can nourish only a certain amount of human life at a given time. We National Socialists are in duty bound to foster individuals of social and biological value". Stoddard was apparently impressed by the health measures taken by the Nazis and later in the book recounts his visit to the Upper Court for Hereditary Health in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Having long been interested in the practical applications of biology and eugenics he had studied much along these lines. He made first-hand investigations whilst in Germany which included discussions with outstanding authorities on the subject. These included official spokesmen such as Frick and Darr and leading scientists Eugen Fischer, Fritz Lenz, Hans Gnther and others. It was through their recommendations that he was able to sit beside the judges during a session of the Eugenic High Court of Appeals. He also quoted Professor Gnther who wrote:
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"The Nordic ideal becomes for us an ideal of unity. That which is common to all divisions of the German people is the Nordic strain. The question is not so much whether we men now living are more or less Nordic; the question put to us is whether we have the courage to make ready for future generations a world cleansing itself racially and eugenically." Stoddard went on to say"Without attempting to appraise this highly controversial racial doctrine (regarding the Jews), it is fair to say that Nazi Germany's eugenic programme is the most ambitious and far-reaching experiment in eugenics ever attempted by any nation." Stoddard went on to describe various aspects of Nazi eugenic population policies but before closing his survey noted the psychological aspects of these. He had found that the rulers of the Third Reich did not stop at legal and economic measures. They were aware that ideology had to be mobilised in order to completely reach their goal. So the German people were systematically propagandised for the upbuilding of what may be described as racial and eugenic consciousness. As if the eight categories of the sterilisation law, by which one had the privilege of being sterilised, had not been enough, it was decided on the 24th of November 1933 that "habitual offenders against public morals" were to be castrated. The Nazi definition of offences against public morals also included "racial pollution". The occurrences of the following years make it evident, that the national socialist experts had far more thorough measures in mind than simple sterilisation and castration as the final solution to social problems.
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It goes without saying that Ernst Rdin unblushingly claimed for the German Racial Hygiene and Eugenic Movement a measure of responsibility for the inspiration of these Laws. The aim of racial hygiene was to create a fictitious Aryan race. In accordance with this all "non-Aryan" elements had to be rooted out. Apart from having a wrong combination of chromosomes, it also seems to have been a "non-Aryan" trait to have or to be of a different opinion. Consequently, all minorities fell into this category, and liquidation, with the exception of the Jews who were declared scapegoats, started with the smallest groups and worked up from there. Because of this, the larger minorities were left with the belief that it never would be their turn. If the Nazis had started from the other end, everyone would have known that it was to be everyone's neck and they could have united themselves against this procedure when the Nazis were not yet firmly established. Amongst the minorities that were considered "non-Aryan" were included the Gypsies, Free-masons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews and Christians. A common denominator of these religions and ideological minorities is that they all strongly believed in something spiritual and mental and oriented their lives according to this belief. They were unlikely to respond to a psychiatric dreamworld and therefore found no place in the psychiatric view of life.
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with warm recommendations. Verschuer was the founder and first director of the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Research at Frankfurt University opened in 1934. Even if it produced nothing else it brought a further star into the Nazi sky; Verschuer's former assistant Dr. Joseph Mengele. From this position he later advanced to be one of the most infamous doctors in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, where he conducted experiments with living and fully conscious prisoners and tortured the camp-inmates for the benefit of "scientific advancement". After the war, Mengele succeeded in escaping the Allies and the law, he left Germany and fled via Italy to Paraguay, settled there, acquired citizenship in his new home country and apparently lives there to this day. The time of his peaceful existence however, will hopefully soon be over; the well known Nazi criminal hunter, Wiesenthal, is on his tracks and will not rest until he has caught up with him. At the 12th meeting of the International Federation of Eugenic Organisations, held in 1936 in Holland, Verschuer appeared as the representative of his Institute together with Ploetz, Rdin and Fischer. One of the papers read to the meeting was by fellow delegate Professor Karl Astel from Himmler's SS "Race and Resettlement Office" (RuSHA). In 1923 Lenz took a further step forward in his endeavours to find a solution to racial hygienic problems by stating that Euthanasia definitely had its place in the racial hygiene plan. The propaganda drums beat without pause, but it was only in the Thirties that the fatal Euthanasia propaganda campaign broke loose and went far beyond Germany's borders. In July 1931 the Union of Bavarian Psychiatrists held a Congress at Munich University. V. Faltlhauser, psychiatrist and active proponent of the mental hygiene movement, who was striving towards yet greater achievement of the euthanasia programme, laid bare the basic thoughts behind the campaign for sterilisation and euthanasia with the following words: Here we will only discuss sterilisation. Basically it represents only one of the paths which lead towards the goal. You know that these measures are heavily opposed. Not only is the unjustified claim, that the question of heredity has not been clarified enough, the obstacle; the obstacles lie rather as already stated in ideological moral and ethical considerations, they lie in the idleness of the broad masses and in obsolete views which I do not wish to go into here. This outlook must cause us to advance carefully but steadily. What primarily seems to be needed is educational work and propaganda for the broad masses, and the facts have to be constantly hammered into them. And this is also one of the many duties of our public welfare section, which should point out this fact in private life and in lectures. It will also be our imperative task to research and make more exact the laws of heredity and their final consequences. And herein again a special task will fall to our public welfare section. At this point I cannot suppress the comment that it must have other methods than those at its disposal today. Today the welfare doctors are swamped in their social tasks especially when you consider they have to do their work in a subsidiary office. If the public welfare section is to do justice to the requests for research made of it, then it should be provided with the means and the personnel. I know what I am demanding at this time of scarce means. But it must be said to prevent the blame being put on public welfare, as it has failed to fulfil demands put on it. When demanding sterilisation, compulsory action is at present to be avoided; on the other hand voluntary sterilisation is to be promoted by any means. For this a clear unequivocal legal safety precaution must be created. It is quite evident that even voluntary sterilisation must be based on certain prerequisites and safety precautions and that clear, flawless, medicallydetermined indicators must be present. What these safety precautions are to look like, whether it is to be a commission or not, whether the commission should consist of doctors, civil-servant doctors or be mixed etc. is a question to be considered and is not relevant to the principle. The clear indication will be in the cases of the gravest strain, which with today's knowledge we must now recognise will have a high probability of heavy hereditary defects in
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the descendants. It need only be mentioned incidentally that sterilisation is only to occur in the form of severing the spermatic duct whilst preserving the gonads or the operative interruption of the Fallopian tube. Also the question of possibly demanding compulsory sterilisation in the cases of criminal tendencies and high-probability hereditary insanity should also be considered. This however should occur only when the broad masses have intensively been worked over in the ways mentioned earlier, and have become mature enough to accept such ideas. Many have said that internment is the only sound measure against the bearers of very bad hereditary mass. But quite apart from the fact that it is the most expensive preventive measure, is it really more humane and a lesser violation of the principle of personal freedom? Do we not forcibly prohibit the party concerned from procreation for their whole life? We Germans cannot totally neglect events which occur outside our borders. A whole series of nations have positively accepted that the laws of heredity do affect the development of mental abnormality and have understood the consequences of that and created sterilisation laws. The Americans have been reproached with reckless pluck because of laws they have passed in 22 of their states. But when we see that an otherwise cool and calculating race such as the Danes pass a sterilisation law, how the canton Waadt has also done this, when the Swedish ministries are seriously dealing with this problem, then this must really give us something to think about. Before I end, I must permit myself a few short comments which are forced upon me by an objective conscience. I believe that we must beware of exaggerated expectations of the success of sterilisation. Sterilisation, even compulsory, will not be able to plug all the fountains of bad hereditary mass. The principle used here to hoodwink the public into accepting enforced sterilisation is to first start a propaganda campaign for voluntary sterilisation. This same rule also applies for compulsory euthanasia where propaganda starts with the introduction of voluntary euthanasia. Both Germany and England were literally flooded with Euthanasia campaigns. In England, Dr. Charles Killick Millard, President of the Society of Medical Officers of Health, brought up in his 1931 Presidential speech the question of voluntary euthanasia and proposed a suitable law. A few years later, he became a fellow founder of the Voluntary Euthanasia Legislation Society and its Honorary Secretary. In 1935 Lord Moynihan, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, founded the Euthanasia Society. A year later this Society handed its recommendations for a Euthanasia project to the House of Lords. Among other things, it provided for the possibility of incurably ill persons being able to petition a Euthanasia Office of the Ministry of Health to let themselves be delivered from their sufferings. It suggested that the applicant should, after consulting his close relatives, handle his estate and choose two medical advisors and a doctor. The Ministry could give its consent for the mercy death to take place after a period of seven days, time allowed for the chance of a change of heart, or an appeal if the relatives so desired. This proposal was fortunately turned down. However, as early as 1923, a step in this direction was taken in Switzerland and a draft for such a law was presented in Denmark in 1924. In the U.S.A., The Chamber of Doctors of the State of Illinois even requested the approval of mercy death. The year 1938 was marked by the establishment of the American Society of Euthanasia, and on similar lines, a society for voluntary euthanasia was founded in Connecticut and drafts of laws were presented to the parliaments of Nebraska and Canada in 1937. In Germany, the activities in the field of euthanasia, reached their climax. In 1934 Baur, who had long advocated the sterilisation law, foretold that such a law would only be a start. The actual campaign for euthanasia in Germany took many forms. Films were produced (among others "I accuse") which were to make obvious that there were useful and less useful members of society, and were
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intended to cause astonishment on the part of the viewer as to why anybody bothered to prolong these unproductive human lives at all. Articles in newspapers informed the reader about costs caused by the mentally ill. and showed plainly how the money could be used for more productive and creative things. The campaign was so extensive that it even reached school books, in which the nature of the problems were to direct the attention of the pupil to this subject. One such example is the arithmetic textbook written in 1935 by Alfred Dorner, whose series of distorted and disguised questions were to have the desired influence. So we see that sterilisation and euthanasia were not the ideas of the Nazis and never had been. They were ideas which were supported and promoted throughout the whole world by groups with a strong interest in the progressive development of mental hygiene and mental health. There is no doubt that euthanasia was supported in many countries, among them America, Finland, England, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Australia and New Zealand. Germany however was the only country in which the political climate was such as to allow materialisation of the final goal of the supporters of sterilisation and euthanasia. Sterilisation laws at the same time were preparing the ground in other countries such as U.S.A. (some states) for much larger endeavours. However the step from sterilisation to murder is great (though apparently less great for someone who has fully absorbed the state of mind of the mental hygiene movement). Therefore it seems only logical that one tried to win the politicians to the new ideals, to manipulate them and to appoint them in the right places, in order to bring about the desired goal. In Germany the politicians were ideal for this purpose, and consequently the action moved much faster there. But, as we will see later, because of the German activities, the attitude towards the subjects of sterilisation and euthanasia changed shortly after the Second World War. The next step, towards the end of 1938 and the beginning of 1939, was publicly tested in Germany after endless discussions and propaganda moves. A letter addressed to Adolf Hitler written by a man called Knauer from Leipzig asked for permission for a doctor to shorten the fife of his child who was born blind, seemed to be an idiot and had only parts of its arms and legs. The child itself was at this time at the Children's Clinic in the University of Leipzig, which was headed by Professor Werner Catel, Professor for Neurology and Psychiatry at the same university. At that time Catel was already an exponent of euthanasia and has remained one to this day which fact he acknowledged in his book "Border Situations of Life - Contribution to the Problem of a Limited Euthanasia". it was Catel who made the suggestion to the father, or at least focused his attention in that direction, to write a letter to the Fhrer. As an answer to this letter, Hitler sent his physician, Professor Karl Brandt, to Leipzig and after consultations with Catel, put the child to sleep. Several months later, Hitler signed a document authorising Dr. Karl Brandt and Reich-leader Philipp Bouhler to permit euthanasia in special cases. This authorisation was supposedly signed in October 1939, but was backdated to the beginning of September of the same year. The document was really nothing more than an authorisation and formulated in such a way that a doctor who truly felt bound to the Hippocratic Oath could interpret it in such a way that no-one would have to die. The "Fhrer-order" as it was generally called, had apparently come about after a lively discussion between Dr. Karl Brandt, Dr. Leonardo Conti and Philipp Bouhler and was as follows: "Reichsleader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt M.D. are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the authority of certain physicians to be designated by name in such a manner that persons who according to human judgement can upon most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness be accorded a mercy death. Signed - A. Hitler". In spite of this, the document was regarded not only as a "legal" basis for the crimes committed by the psychiatrists of Nazi Germany, but later at the Nuremberg trials and in other court cases, it was used as a justification where the accused attempted to interpret this authorisation as an order.
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The question about the so-called "Fhrer-order" is usually done away with by stating that Hitler wanted to achieve one of his goals with this document. However, several facts contradicted this widespread theory and should be mentioned in this context. Obviously Hitler agreed or at least sympathised with the arguments of the eugenically-oriented groups, which were trying to defend sterilisation and euthanasia. This we know from his earlier studies and activities, but one cannot charge him with having voiced his opinion in this direction very often. On the contrary, he seldom remarked on it. The actual document was very vague, and it is not even clear that the victims were to be hopelessly mentally ill, but only referred to incurably sick generally. The previously mentioned Knauer case is a typical example of the psychiatric way of thinking and their tactics. The Third Reich is usually looked upon as a monolithic state, a pyramid structure with Hitler at the top followed by the administrative machinery of government and its subordinate organisations, which form a wide basis, the whole system unified and dynamic. In actual fact, the Third Reich was a system of agencies, departments and branches of government all in competition with each other. All endeavoured to play each other off against each other for reasons of prestige, in order to win the favour of the Fhrer or to increase their power. Hitler himself issued different versions of the same order to keep his subordinates divided and in competition with each other. This way there was less chance of their becoming dangerous to him. Hitler had purposely disarranged the "whole" structure of the Reich, with the aim of achieving a shift of emphasis of function, a tactic which proved successful in ensuring his own position of power. Apart from the actual government offices the NSDAP committees established before the seizure of power remained in existence, so that Hitler had two organisations at his disposal with greatly overlapping functions. The administration of the Third Reich was, therefore, a chaotic confusion of conflicts, jealousies and duplication of actions. An order which was not taken up by someone and worked on or passed on, just remained an order and ended up in a desk-drawer, never executed. Actually a great deal of effort was necessary to get a lot of things moving at all. Additionally, after the seizure of power, Hitler was only interested in activities for which he had a special affinity and he neglected other activities. Ministers and functionaries often did not see him at all for long periods of time. To the degree that Hitler engrossed himself in the plans for the expansion of the Reich, he had to deal more and more with the solution of military problems and with diplomatic matters. His interest in non-military matters and initiatives declined Thus because Hitler's attention was unequivocally on other matters, the "experts" who were continuously exerting pressure on internal affairs, such as initiating the mass-murder of mental patients, also assumed responsibility for it. This is affirmed by the two well known and informed American journalists William L. Shirer and Joseph Harsch both active as foreign correspondents in Berlin in those years. Shirer collected his impressions in his "Berlin Diary" published in England in 1941. Towards the end of his diary notes the author deals with his experiences with the euthanasia programme. He writes: "What is stilt unclear to me is the motive for these murders. Germans themselves advance three:
1. That they are being carried out to save food. 2. That they are done for the purpose of experimenting with new poison gases and death rays. 3. That they are simply the result of the extreme Nazis deciding to carry out their eugenic and sociological ideas." Shirer continues with his views and comes to the conclusion: "The first motive is obviously absurd, since the death of 100,000 persons will not save much food for a nation of 80 million. Besides, there is no acute food shortage in Germany. The
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second motive is possible, though I doubt it. Poison gases may have been used in putting these unfortunates out of the way, but if so, the experimentation was only incidental. Many Germans I have talked to think that some new gas which disfigures the body has been used, and that this is the reason why the remains of the victims have been cremated. But I can get no real evidence of this". And now he comes to a very interesting section in which he writes: "The third motive seems the most likely to me. For years a group of radical Nazi sociologists who were instrumental in putting through the Reich's sterilisation laws have pressed for a national policy of eliminating the mentally unfit. They say they have disciples among many sociologists in other lands and perhaps they have. Paragraph two of the form letter sent the relatives plainly bears the stamp of this sociological thinking: "In view of the nature of his serious, incurable ailment, his death, which saved him from a life long institutional sojourn, is to be regarded merely as a release. Some suggest a fourth motive. They say the Nazis calculate that for every 3 or 4 institutional cases, there must be one healthy German to look after them. This takes several thousand good Germans away from more profitable employment. If the insane are killed off, it is further argued by the Nazis, there will be plenty of hospital space for the war wounded should the war be prolonged and large casualties occur." This information which Shirer for some reason does not consider or puts aside as being absurd or unimportant, when examined proves to be rather useful. Of the motives the Germans propagate as their reason for these murders, three seem to hold up under examination. The first motive, however, that they were committed to save food, originated before these measures were brought in, and thus seems quite a logical conclusion. However when one looks at the result and when one compares 100,000 patients with eighty million as Shirer had done, the whole thing stands out as absurd. The second reason, that the murders had been committed in order to experiment with new poisonous gases, also makes sense. In the beginning stages of the euthanasia programme, many experiments were carried out to find the most effective and fastest method of exterminating the victims. The third motive which the Germans propagated themselves, was that these murderous actions were the result of extreme National Socialists who wanted to materialise their social-hygienic and social ideas. As the whole programme was kept strictly confidential and therefore was known only by a very few people, it seems as though the Nazis had carried it out themselves. However, from the history of the preparations for these murder actions, it is obvious [and in the following chapter we will go into this in detail] that it was the extremist psychiatrists and the Nazis who together put these ideas into action. The fourth motive offered to Shirer by some Germans that new gases were used which deformed bodies and that this was the reason for the cremation of the mortal remains is also worth examining in more detail. The new gas which was used in the beginning was not so new. In fact it was simply carbon monoxide from combustion engines which did indeed deform bodies. The patients usually died under circumstances which caused deformations [some of the bodies discoloured and excrement and other fluids ran out]. It is evident that they were often in a condition which did not permit them to be put in a coffin and to be transferred. A further point which must be considered is that such a corpse, if returned to relatives would hardly have stood up to an examination to confirm the cause of death, should the family have wanted it. The distressing thing about Shirer's Diary is that he received his information from Germans not as a rumour but as fact, and obviously obtained it first hand. He describes the Nazis as sociologists and probably uses this term as a collective term which includes psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociohygienists and mental hygienists. And his conclusion is correct. They were racial, they served as
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tools to pass the Sterilisation Laws, they exerted pressure to direct the national politics towards the elimination of the mentally ill and they were very successful in all these. Shirer's claim that German sociologists had many supporters abroad was also valid. Joseph Harsch the second American journalist in Berlin, confirms Shirer's information in his book "Pattern for Conquest". "Those who proposed it (the plan for euthanasia) are understood to have asked Hitler for a written edict, or law which would officially authorise them to proceed with the "mercy killings". Hitler is represented as having hesitated for several weeks. Finally, doubting that Hitler would ever sign the official order the proponents of the project, drafted a letter for him to sign which merely expressed his, Hitler's, general approval of the theory of euthanasia as a means of relieving incompetents of the burden of life. While this letter did not have the character of law it was adequate in Nazi Germany. The Fhrer had expressed approval of the practice. It went ahead." Following the Knauer case, a group of competent specialists were called to the Reich Chancellery to form a Euthanasia Committee. Psychiatrist, and ministerial adviser for health in the Reich Ministry, SS Oberfhrer Dr. Herbert Linden, was appointed as its head. Later Linden was to act as liaison between the Chancellery and the Reich Health Service, which was attached to the Ministry of the Interior and led by Reich Doctor Fhrer Leonardo Conti. The founding of this committee was the first of what were to become regular meetings of the medical advisers for the purpose of better estimating the necessary administrative and technical facilities. Lindens committee consisted of: Professor Hans Heinze, Chief of the Brandenberg Mental Institute. Professor Werner Catel, Lecturer in Neurology and Psychiatry at Leipzig University and head of the Paediatric Clinic in Leipzig. Dr. Helmut Unger, Ophthalmologist, author of a novel on the euthanasia question ("Mission and Conscience") and Press liaison officer for the Reich Doctor Fhrer Dr. Wagner. Dr. Ernst Wentzler Paediatrician. Linden rapidly expanded the committee with the following additional specialists for neurology and psychiatry: Professor Max de Crinis, Lecturer in Neurology and Psychiatry at Berlin University, secret agent and friend of Waiter Schellenburg-who held a high post in the Nazi Secret Service. [Dr. Crinis was involved in the Venlo Incident staged shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War in which two British and a Dutch Intelligence agent were kidnapped by the Germans]. Professor Berthold Kihn, Lecturer in Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Jena. Professor Carl Schneider, Lecturer in Neurology and Psychiatry at Heidelberg University. Dr. Hermann Pfannmller, who was Dr. Faltlhauser's assistant in the Asylum at Kaufbeuren and as of 1938 Director of the Mental Hospital Eglfing-Haar. Dr. Bender - director of the Buch Mental Hospital near Berlin. A short time later the special advisers to T4 were attached: Professor Werner Heyde, Lecturer in Neurology and Psychiatry at Wrzburg University. Professor Paul Nitsche, Lecturer in Psychiatry at Halle University up to 1939. Director of the Sonnenstein institute near Pirna, which became one of the murder schools. Now having the necessary advice from the "experts" about the size of the problem, of numbers, where, when, how, who, etc., the administrative machinery of T4 was put together. The programme had been drawn, the task could commence.
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There was a parallel organisation, another front group devoted exclusively to the killing of children, for obviously some specialisation was needed in this area, and the front group catered for those who had knowledge and experience of children. It was known under the ambiguous name of Realms Committee for Scientific Approach to Severe Illness due to Heredity and Constitution. In association with these two organisations were the Charitable Company for the Transport of the Sick which transported patients to the killing centres, and the Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care which was in charge of making the final arrangements. The decree of the Reich Ministry of the Interior of August 18 1939, which introduced the requirements for registration of "deformed new-born" was a great advantage to the children project. At first this applied only the children up to the age of 3, but after 1941 this project included youths to the age of 16. These four cover organisations safeguarded the project T4, the Reich Chancellery, and the euthanasia committee from unwanted discoveries. Those who took the initiative were very secure and if anyone had attempted to retrace the administrative chain, let us say from an institute whose patients were moved to killing-institutes, he would probably have reached one of the four cover organisations. The chances that he would get much further were very small. Ironically the relatives of the patients were charged with the cost of the killing, without however being informed as to what they were paying for. The questionnaires having been sent out were completed by the psychiatrists, doctors in charge of the patients in the asylums. When the questionnaires came back they were evaluated by the psychiatric and professional members of T4 who were mainly leading professors of psychiatry in German Universities. The whole business was in keeping with the euthanasia programme in that no one was ever actually examined in person, in direct violation of any normal medical approach or standards, especially when one considers that life or death hung on the decision of the psychiatrist evaluating. Processing of the questionnaires was done very rapidly; for example one expert between November 14th and December 1st 1940 evaluated 2,109 of them. At the beginning of the euthanasia programme and for some time during it, Jews were very carefully excluded from amongst the people who were being accorded a blessed release from their sufferings. The reason, apparently, was that such a worthwhile fate was obviously not to be given to Jews, that only Germans could benefit by such a humane measure. That the euthanasia programme was such a haphazard stab at resolving the social problem as an emergency measure was shown by the approach and organisation of the whole thing. At the time the questionnaires went out, or perhaps even earlier, a number of mental hospitals or convenient buildings were being converted for their later use and were to be the killing centres and schools for murder. Death chambers were erected in the buildings disguised as shower-baths and crematoriums both of which were identical to those later to be established in the Jew-killing centres in Poland. There appear to have been six principal death institutes and murder schools, and these were Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim (in Austria), Brandenberg, Bernberg, and Sonnenstein, the hospital of the super-expert Dr. Nitsche. The system seems to have worked in the following fashion. On the basis of the replies to the questionnaires, the Institute from which they had been returned were notified that a number of patients were to be moved, allegedly to make available beds for the war wounded, or to be moved for better treatment. A number of reasons were made known or put around as the reason for removal. These patients were collected by the front organisation Charitable Transport Company for the Sick, which then took them to one of these killing centres, where they were exterminated within a few hours of their arrival. As a further camouflage they were not always taken directly to the killing centre; on some occasions they were taken to an intermediate hospital where people were led to believe that they were there to be placed under observation. The total number of victims of the euthanasia programme is difficult to determine but as there were 300,000 to 320,000 mental patients in 1939 and only 40,000 in 1946 it would seem that the figure of
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275,000 deaths mentioned in the Nuremberg Trials was reasonably accurate. The victims were not confined to mentally incurable patients; as the programme progressed and gained momentum other undesirables were included. It was obviously too great an opportunity to be missed to not include anyone else who wasn't worthy of life. Amongst those caught up in the dragnet for the murder institutes were psychotics, schizophrenics, patients suffering from infirmities of old age, as well as epileptics, and other patients suffering from a variety of organic neurology disorders, including the various forms of infantile paralysis, parkinsonism, multiple sclerosis and brain tumours. We also know that children were disposed of similarly, when the orphanages and reformatories were searched for further candidates. It should be borne in mind that according to one expert at least 50/o of the patients murdered would, if allowed to survive, have been able to recover and lead useful lives. As we have seen, T4 went into a great deal planning to disguise its operations and those of the killing centres as ordinary mental hospitals and this was testified to in the Nuremberg trials by Viktor Brack, the chief of the whole section II of KdF and therefore one of the main persons responsible for the smooth execution of the euthanasia program. At the Nuremberg trials, he testified that patients walked calmly in with their towels and stood with their lithe pieces of soap under the shower outlets waiting for the water to start running. I have been able to find more material on some murder institutions than others, but the following account could be taken as fairly representative of the other five murder institutions. Hartheim was situated near Linz which was in turn also close to Hitler's birthplace in Austria. It was an old castle dedicated as an asylum to the poor, feeble minded and stupid in 1898. Hartheim, in company with the other institutions, not only served as a murder institute for the disposal of mental patients, but also functioned as a murder school for personnel. The medical directors in charge of Hartheim were two doctors, Dr. Rudolf Lohnauer, an Austrian who later became an expert in 14fl3 of which we will hear more later, and Dr. Georg Renno. They took their orders direct from T4 and were responsible for the "medical" training of personnel. The training of staff was designed to harden the personnel psychologically to the experience of having to exterminate and observe the deaths of tens of thousands of people, day after day, week after week, apart from any technical training they were given. However, from later activities in the operation of the death chambers and crematoriums, it was obvious that they were being schooled for bigger things in the workings of the Third Reich. Most of the personnel concerned in these later activities had passed through one of these murder schools. The administrative official in charge at Hartheim was Captain Christian Wirth, a former policeman, who had been selected by T4 to supervise the training. Apart from being paid for disposing of unwanted mental patients, and to train personnel, these institutes also provided scientific testing grounds for the perfection of the murder techniques as devised by the psychiatrists on the euthanasia committees of T4. The deaths of the victims were clinically studied photographed and perfected. In the war crimes trials that took place after the war in Germany, it was proved that in the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, special photographers also took pictures of people being gassed, just as they had at Hartheim and other institutes. In addition, experiments took place with various mixtures of gases in order to perfect the most effective one. During these tests, psychiatrists with stop-watches would observe the dying patients through the peepholes in the cellar door, which served as the gas chamber in Hartheim, and the length of the death struggle was clocked down to one-tenth of a second. Slow motion pictures were made and studied by the psychiatric experts at T4 in Berlin. People's brains were photographed to see exactly when death had occurred. Nothing was left to chance. The psychiatrists were very thorough. The actual training of the students proceeded in an orderly progression of familiarisation. At first they watched the experiment as observers, as their training progressed they graduated to participation in the actual murders by conducting the patients into the chambers, releasing the gases, watching during the death struggle and finally ventilating the chambers and removing the bodies. The selection of the students was conducted by the high ranking Nazi officials who were personally and directly responsible to the
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Fhrer Chancellery. The whole operation was shrouded in very tight security. Everybody involved realised that there could be no slip-ups - there could be no leakage of information, because they weren't dealing with sub-humans and Jews; these victims were Germans and Austrians and the reaction of the public would be very strong. And in fact, when the programme later became obvious to the inhabitants in the vicinity of the murder institutes, there was an outcry against it. Obviously, after so much familiarity with the deaths of the victims, the students became insensible to the cries and pleas of the murdered. In the process of their being hardened, the students were observed closely by their teachers who noted their reactions and made reports on their progress as pupils. If the students were able to observe and participate in the murders of their own nationalities, even though they were deformed or mad and were of German or Austrian nationality, how much easier it would be to do the same to "sub-humans". Students who didn't complete the course because they cracked, couldn't go o in with it or were unsuitable, were sent to the war front where the Commander in charge of the unit would assign them to a suicide squad. This would account for the lack of people with conscience willing to come forward to testify to what had been involved in. The total number of victims at Hartheim is difficult to estimate but at the Dachau trial in 1947 testimony was given that from 30-40 unwanted humans were treated in the cellars every day. As Hartheim was in operation for about three years that would account for about 30,000 people. Hartheim also had another purpose. It served as a safety valve when executions taking place in nearby concentration camps such as Mauthausen and Dachau became more than the staff could manage. Victims were sent to Hartheim and "dispatched" there. Later, towards the end of the war Hartheim became just another place for extermination, its staff and personnel having been assigned to other duties. It was well situated for use in the euthanasia programme lying near a railway, but not too close, and around the castle were a few little houses and farms. It was 17 kilometers from Linz and from there only another 23 kilometers from Mauthausen. Schooling of the personnel produced perfect murderers who were used to the smell of burnt flesh, had been taught how to trick people being led to their death, and how to steel themselves against the crying and pleading of the victims. Pupils were naturally rewarded, not only with alcohol and women, which were always kept handy for them, but also received medals. Usually, these were the Iron Cross Second Class and, unlike other awards which had noted in the register the reason for their being given, in these cases " Geheime Reichssache" [Secret Reich matter] was noted in the appropriate column. One of the murder institutes, Hadamar, achieved some notoriety at the time of the euthanasia programme. In December 1939 a member of the Court of Appeals of Frankfurt-on-Main wrote to the Minister of Justice complaining about the situation. He said that among the population there were constant discussions over the question of the destruction of the socially unfit, especially in places where there were mental institutions. Vehicles used to transport the mental patients from the institutes had come to be recognised by the inhabitants. With busloads of victims converging on Hadamar, things had reached such a state that even the children were calling out as the buses passed that "they are taking some more people to be gassed". The writer had obviously found out enough to be able to describe in his letter that there were stories circulating about transported victims being immediately stripped to the skin, dressed in paper shirts and forthwith taken to a gas chamber where they were liquidated with hydrocyanic acid gas, and the bodies reported to be moved to crematoriums by means of conveyor belts, six bodies to a furnace. He also went on to recount rumours about future victims and believed that these would include the inhabitants of Homes for the Aged and others. Interestingly, the psychiatrist in charge at Hadamar was Dr. Adolf Wahlmann an active member of the German mental hygiene movement, who had demonstrated cardiazol-shock treatment to delegates from the European Mental Hygiene Reunion (which took place in Munich in 1938).
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This was not, however, the only letter of complaint, and many more followed when the never-ending smoke that fined the skies in the vicinity of the institutes for murder indicated that something was obviously terribly wrong. Various members of the communities (usually people with some standing), sent complaints to whoever they thought would be in a position to act. The main source of complaints appear to have come from the Church, and protests were raised by various Bishops and Cardinals usually addressed to the Ministry of Justice. The Bishop of Limburg for instance addressed a complaint to the Ministry concerning the institute of Hadamar, and it was very similar to the one by the member of the Court of Appeals, mentioned earlier, when children were calling out as the vans arrived, only now parents were even threatening their children that if they weren't quite bright, they would be put in the oven at Hadamar. Obviously, with the mounting protests and complaints, the whole operation was receiving far too much publicity and it was at this point in about December 1941 that a change in procedure occurred. And here we come to another of the myths with which this period is littered. It was commonly believed that as the protests grew they came to the ears of the Fhrer who ordered an end to the killings. However, be that as it may, the killings did not stop. They simply took on a different form. Many of the writers and articles dealing with this period state that the programme ended. What actually happened was that the same aims were procured by different means. The gas chambers were no longer used and the crematoria also fell into disuse. These were replaced by lethal injections and even starvation, the bodies being disposed of by mass burial. As far as the psychiatrists were concerned it was business as usual, and the euthanasia programme continued throughout the war. And in Bavaria it continued even until a few days after the war when children were still being murdered. If Hitler did order an end to the euthanasia murders, their continuance only goes to show how determined the psychiatrists were to pursue their own aims regardless of his wishes.
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questionnaires. The second lot consisted of 1200 Jews who were not examined and it was enough to pick out from their documents the reason for their arrest and enter it in the questionnaires." Apart from the people already covered, the action was extended to include adults and children in many Polish asylums. However there is little evidence available to me at this time regarding these particular murders, and this is a very fruitful area to be examined in the future. Apart from the psychiatrists themselves involved in the programme, others also took advantage of the rare opportunity of so many specimens offered them. One of these was a brain specialist Dr. Julius Hailervorden, Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Dillenberg, Hessen-Nassau, who had the good luck to be able to obtain hundreds of brains from the killing centres for use in his laboratory. These brains were from mental patients in various institutions who had been killed by carbon monoxide gas. He freely admitted that he himself had initiated this collaboration in the euthanasia programme and stated: "I heard that they were going to do that, and so I went up to them and told them, `Look here now, boys (Menschenskinder), if .you are going to kill all these people, at least take the brains out so that the material could be utilised.' They asked me: `How many can you examine?' and so I told them `An unlimited number-the more the better.' I gave them the fixatives, jars and boxes, and instructions for removing and fixing the brains, and then they came bringing them in like the delivery van from the furniture company. The Charitable Transport Company for the Sick brought the brains in batches of 150-250 at a time... There was wonderful material among those brains beautiful mental defectives, mal-formations and early infantile diseases. I accepted those brains of course. Where they came from and how they came to me was realty none of my business." The development of occurrences up to this time shows plainly that there were no limits to the enthusiasm that the psychiatrists in Berlin felt for T4. How patriotic they must have considered themselves when they then decided to put their brave teams into action in the East, to help the wounded in ice and snow. As Dr. Fritz Mennecke told his wife in a letter on 12th January 1942. "Since the day before yesterday a large delegation from our organisation, headed by Herr Brack, is on the battlefields of the East to help in saving our wounded in the ice and snow. They include doctors, clerks, nurses, and male nurses from Hadamar and Sonnenstein, a whole detachment of 20-30 persons. This is a top secret. Only those persons who could not be spared were excluded. Professor Nitsche regrets that the staff of our institution at Eichberg had to be taken away so soon." This quote speaks for itself, when one considers who was "helping" the wounded in ice and snow. It becomes evident that the German soldiers in the East had to fight three fronts: the Russian Army, the partisans and the enemies in their own ranks. As if the war-killing had not been enough, now special committees were put into action to relieve the wounded German soldiers from their painful existence. The soldiers thus were not only in a fix strategically, but also morally as well; if they were wounded, how would they be "helped"?
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men. Morgen amazed at this weird tale looked further and in doing so came across another camp, "rather peculiar and impenetrable" which was run by Christian Wirth, who confirmed the story of the Jewish wedding and explained that it was part of a plan by which Wirth hoped to persuade Jews to serve in the camps where they would assist in the exterminations. Although the four camps had been mentioned earlier in the Nuremberg trials, this was the first clue concerning their ultimate headquarters. Morgen insisted that the administration of the camps was actually not in SS hands having seen Wirth's daily orders. These did not come from Himmler's Office but from the Fhrer's Chancellery (T4) and had been signed "Blankenberg". Morgen's evidence was the only clue to the true command lines of the Jewish extermination programme. This was confirmed years later in the recent trial of the notorious Franz Stangl. He was an Austrian policeman who automatically became a member of the Austrian Gestapo following the Anschluss. In November 1940 he was transferred to the General Foundation for institutional Care, one of the T4 front groups. He was told to report to a Dr. Werner at the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt in Berlin. Werner told him that he'd been selected for a very difficult and demanding job of police superintendent at a special institute administered by the Foundation. Werner explained to him that both Russia and America had for some time had a law which allowed them to carry out mercy killings (this of course was not true) on people who were insane or badly deformed. He explained that a law was going to be passed in Germany in the near future but it was going to be done only after a great deal of psychological preparation. However, in the meantime the task had begun under absolute secrecy. He then went on to explain that the patients selected for the action were carefully examined and a series of tests were carried out by at least two physicians and only those absolutely incurable were put to a totally painless death. Stangl was told that all he had to do was to be responsible for law and order in the institute and not actually involved in the operation himself, this being carried out entirely by doctors. He was to be responsible for maintaining maximum security. After his talk with Werner, Stangl reported to the KdF. He recalled that he thought it was Brack who greeted him at T4, explained to him his specific police duties and left him the choice of where he should be posted. He decided to be posted to Austria where he would be near his family. He was given a telephone number and the name of a village where he was to go and make a `phone call and would be given instructions.' He carried out the instructions for making contact and was driven to Hartheim. After arrival he met the doctors and Captain Christian Wirth, who was his superior in his duties. Wirth apparently didn't bother too much with the scientific justifications that the psychiatrists employed, because as he said, sentimental slobber about such people made him puke. The two chief medical officers were Dr. Lohnauer and Dr. Renno and in addition to these there were 14 nurses; 7 men and 7 women. Hartheim was set up and run as a hospital where examinations were given and Stangl's job was to see that such things as identity papers and certificates for the mental patients were dealt with and done correctly. After Hartheim, Stangl took a brief tour of duty at another euthanasia institute, Bernberg and after that was told to report back to T4 to get new orders. in the interview he was informed that he had a choice either to return to his former police post (where he hadn't in fact got on very welt with his superiors) or go to Lublin, in Poland. He decided on the latter and was told to report to Higher SS and Police Chief Odilo Globocnik at SS Headquarters, Lublin. Globocnik gave him the task of building a new extermination camp - Sobibor. Shortly after his arrival at the site that was to be Sobibor, personnel from the "euthanasia action" started to arrive. Amongst them were many old friends from Hartheim and work started on the camp which Stangl was to command from May until August 1942, when he took over Treblinka until August 1943. Although he was able to evade justice after the war he was finally caught and sentenced in 1970 to life imprisonment for co-responsibility in the murder of 400,000 men, women and children in Treblinka during the year of his command. It is difficult to arrive at even approximate totals of the number of men, women
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and children who died in these camps but the following figures from the Polish Commission for War Crimes will give some idea of the enormity of the crime: Treblinka ... ... ... ... ... ... . 700,000-800,000 Sobibor ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .. . over 250,000 Belzec ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... almost 600,000 Chelmno ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... over 300,000 Interestingly some of the "students" trained in the murder schools were later traced to the extermination camps, 130 to Belzec, 106 to Sobibor and 90 to Treblinka. Many of these had learned their skills in Hartheim. As the tide of war turned in the East there was much activity to prevent the camps falling into Russian hands and being exploited by them for propaganda purposes. Elaborate precautions were taken to avoid this by razing the sites level and generally altering the landscape by planting trees and shrubs etc. Personnel of the camps were dispersed to high risk war areas. Wirth himself is believed to have been killed by partisans in Yugoslavia in 1944. Amongst the "bureaucrats of death" there was the inevitable scramble to evade the Allied armies as they closed in on the Reich. Some were successful, others not. Philip Bouhler committed suicide as the Russians approached Berlin and Leonardo Conti also in his cell at Nuremberg. Karl Brandt was caught, sentenced and executed. The Limburg trial planned in 1961 was concerned with some of the top psychiatrists and bureaucrats, one of whom was the eminent psychiatrist Professor Dr. Werner Heyde super expert in T4. In the preceding years he had adopted an alias, being known as Dr. Sawade and had practised openly in Germany. He had done a variety of work for a state insurance agency, and law courts. Many people including Judges, Prosecutors, physicians, university professors and high state officials knew his identity. And they preserved the conspiracy of silence. Whilst awaiting trial he attempted to escape. Five days before the trial at a time when he was left unguarded, he committed suicide. His co-defendants in the trial also managed to escape justice. Dr. Friedrich Tillman for 10 years prior to 1945 Director of Cologne orphanages jumped (or was pushed) from a tenth-storey window; another Dr. Bohne escaped on the Nazi escape-route to South America. The fourth Defendant, Dr. Hans Hefelmann, chief of section IIb ("mercy killing") in the Chancellery of the Fhrer was declared medically unable to stand trial due to illness. it seems that people in high places didn't want these trials to take place. Another personality who was questioned during the preparation of the same trial was Dr. Werner Villinger, who has been credited with being instrumental in starting the mental hygiene movement in pre-war Germany, and re-starting the same movement as a mental health movement after the war. An eminent psychiatrist who, two years before Hitler came to power, had advocated the sterilisation of patients with hereditary diseases, he was convinced that the roots of what we call temperament and character lay deep in the inherited constitution. At the time of his questioning for the Limburg trial it became known publicly that he was implicated in the euthanasia murders in a prominent and very active role. He went into the mountains and committed suicide. A former colleague and assistant of his Dr. Helmut Ehrhardt, in an obituary published in the journal "Der Nervenarzt" [The Nerve Doctor] explained Dr. Villager's sad demise as an accident and with much sorrow, regretted his passing, and mourned the loss for humanity of such a wonderful and humane man. However, for those who survived the war, did not commit suicide, and were still at large, there was at least one place where they could appear with impunity in an understanding community who welcomed their talents and shared their viewpoint.
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Care-Association should amalgamate into one Association. So, for the duration of the war a Provisional Association for Mental Health was formed under the Chairmanship of Lady Norman. At the end of the war Montagu and Priscilla Norman gave themselves whole-heartedly to the establishment of such an Association. as Lord Feversham had suggested, in which the related organisations were amalgamated. As Montagu had retired in 1944, he dedicated himself completely to his wife's scheme and complemented her methods with his own. From meetings at Thorpe Lodge, the home of the Normans, the National Association for Mental Health became a reality and the framework for similar changes to take place in the rest of the world. Otto Niemeyer was made Treasurer, and the next phase began. Upon the invitation of the NAMH, the international Committee for Mental Hygiene held a congress at the Ministry of Health in London, where it formally established itself under the new name, World Federation for Mental Health - WFMH. It became the international co-ordinator for national Mental Health and Mental Hygiene groups in many countries of the world, and besides a new name, the meeting initiated a change in the direction of its activities. Already we see the strong involvement of the NAMH in the WFMH, and in future history the NAMH succeeded in exerting considerable influence in the activities of the WFMH. Lady Norman was appointed to the Executive Board of WFMH and with Otto Niemeyer's niece, Mary Appleby, as the General Secretary of the British NAMH, the chain was complete. Miss Appleby s previous experience in the German Section of the British Foreign Office would serve her well. The first elected president of the WFMH was Dr. John Rawlings Rees, a British psychiatrist who was quoted at the beginning of this chapter. The full lecture details a plan whereby each mental hygienist operates as a lone-agent, constantly feeding propaganda to private individuals and groups without naming the Mental Hygiene movement as the true sponsor. He asks that constant propaganda be fed to and pressure put on: Universities, Educational Establishments, Medicine, Press, Parliament, Magazines and Weeklies, Literary figures, Film makers, medical students, civil servants and trades union leaders. To obtain the goals of the Mental Hygiene movement, without the movement ever being named. In 1948 when he was elected Chairman of the WFMH he accepted the position on this newly-formed august body. The congress at which the WFMH was inaugurated was the Third International Congress on Mental Health. A Vice-President of the Congress was Dr. Carl G. Jung who had been described by Dr. Conti as "representing German psychiatry under the Nazis". He had been co-editor of the Journal for Psychotherapy with Dr. M.H. Goering, the cousin of Marshal Hermann Goering. There is definite evidence that Dr. Goering was fully cognisant of the euthanasia murders. Another of the German delegates to the 1948 congress was Dr. Friedrich Mauz, Professor of Psychiatry at Koenigsburg University. He denied his connection to the euthanasia programme, without condemning it, by indicating that his invitation to a euthanasia conference was no conclusive evidence of his complicity in any such activities. Dr Adolf Wahlmann, a noted psychiatrist in the European League for Mental Hygiene would have attended if he had not previously stood trial and been imprisoned for the murder of Polish and other labourers in his institution, Hadamar, which had already been emptied by the mass-murder of all the patients contained therein. As already mentioned, Hadamar Institution trained many of the extermination camp officers on special assignments by T4. Among them there was a man called Gomerski who was engaged in mass killings at Treblinka and Sobibor with such skill, as a result of his training, that he was nicknamed "The Doctor". Thanks to the propaganda and social education of the eugenicists and mental healers, the killing of mental patients has never been considered a terribly serious matter, and Wahlmann, a mass-murderer, was released in 1954.
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Dr. Paul Nitsche would also have attended, as he was a leading member of the Mental Hygiene movement, had it not been for the fact that he was executed for the mass-murder of mental patients in 1947. Shortly, other surviving members of the old gang began to gather in the WFMH. Dr Werner Villinger had, after the war become a world-famous psychiatrist. His specialities included juvenile delinquency, child guidance and group therapy. He was also Professor of Psychiatry at Marburg and a very important member of the WFMH. He sat on the US White House Conference on Children and Youth. In the conference of the WFMH on Health and Human Relations which took place in Hiddesennear-Detmold in 1951, he was co-chairman together with Rees. In 1952 he was a member of a WFMH group on Educating the Public which met during the Annual Conference in Brussels. Doris Odlum, late member of the Eugenics Society and Miss Appleby, already mentioned were Chairman and Secretary respectively of the group. In 1961 German Federal Authorities caught up with Villinger and after three preliminary sessions prior to the Limburg trial, as we have seen already, he threw himself off a mountain top near Innsbruck to his death. His apologist and author of his obituary Dr. Ehrhardt, was also an active member of the WFMH. In the book "Contemporary European Psychiatry" (a book on different psychiatric practices in Europe) which was published in 1961 in the United States and Europe, the Austrian psychiatrist Dr. Hans Hoff claims in his chapter on Germany and Austria, that sterilisation of mentally ill was a scientific procedure so long as a psychiatrist was adviser to the Eugenic Courts. As did Ehrhard, Hoff praises the work of Villinger. Hoff was an active supporter of the WFMH, and in 1959 he became its President. Shortly after Ehrhardt's whitewash of Villinger's suicide, Hoff attempted an even trickier whitewash job, in a preface to Ehrhardt's book "Euthanasie und Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens" (Euthanasia and the Destruction of `Life-unworthy' Life) and he gives it full approval. Basically, they confused the whole issue by pointing out that the question of euthanasia is stilt a medical and moral one. In 1968, Ehrhardt was elected to the Executive Board of the WFMH. The book was favourably reviewed in an American psychiatric journal. Ehrhardt also praised Dr. Max de Crinis as a "courageous and energetic physician" and spoke of the "comparatively few mental patients" killed. De Crinis had of course been one the T4 advisers. His former assistant, Dr. Muller-Hegemann, was left behind the Iron Curtain after the Second World War ended. However, even so daunting a situation could not halt the course of progress and by 1969 Dr. MullerHegemann had been elected to the Executive Board of the WFMH. The supporters of the eugenic movement from all over the world who had backed the mass-murders morally, streamed into the WFMH and its member associations at an alarming rate, and yesterday's euthanasiasts became today's Mental Healthists. Some of them kept their membership card of the Eugenics Society others let it drop, but didn't forget its ideals. Others again, to be fair, must have realised their error and disappeared from the picture, but this was only a small percentage. In Great Britain the eugenically oriented salvationists who became active mental health supporters were: Dr. Doris Odlum; Dr. E. Slater; Sir Aubrey Lewis; Dr. Lancelot Hogben; Miss Robina Addis; Lord and Lady Adrian; Lord Brain; Sir Russell Brain; Prof. C. Fraser Brockington; Dr. Felix W. Brown; Rt. Hon. Sir John Brunner; Prof. Cyril Burt; Comdr. and Mrs. B.R. Darwin; Lady Darwin; Prof. H.J. Eysenck; The Earl of Feversham; Miss Evelyn Fox; Dame Katherine Furse; The Earl of Iveagh; Dr. F.M. Martin; Dr. T.A. Munro; Lady Petrie; Dr. R.E. Pilkington; Kenneth Robinson; The Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Scott; Mrs H.M. Strickland; Prof. J.M. Tanner; Prof. Sir G.H. Thomson; Prof. R.M. Titmuss; Dr. J. Tizard; Dr. A.F. Tredgold; Dr. R.F. Tredgold; Dr. Isabel G.H. Wilson; Prof. R.C. Wofinden; Dr. T.L. Pilkington. In West Germany:
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Dr. Werner Villinger (T4-adviser); Dr. Carl Jung; Dr. Werner Heyde (T4-adviser); Dr. Ehrhard (Villinger's Assistant). In East Germany: Dr. Muller-Hegemann (De Crinis Assistant). The German Society for Mental Hygiene, however, was dissolved, its members scattered for cover and its reports left incomplete. Until today no new German Society has been founded on a national basis. Villinger had tried to collect the Mental Hygiene movement back into one group, but the murderers were not willing to come together in a German society, where they could easily be isolated as a cancer. Instead they preferred the mask of a group from which they could direct similar campaigns on each country in the world, just as they had done before. Their names are still to be found amongst the professors for psychiatry at the universities, the staff in scientific research institutes, and among the members of professional associations. In Austria: Professor Hans Hoff. In Canada: Dr. Karl Stern (who studied in Germany under Ernst Rdin). In Denmark: Dr. Georg K. Strup; Dr Pout Bonnevie; Dr. Paul J. Reiter; Dr. Erik Strmgren; Dr. Einar Geert-Jorgensen; Dr August Wimmer; Dr Kurt Fremming; Dr. Jens Chr. Smidt; Dr. Tage Kemp; Dr. Max Schmidt; Dr. G.E. Schroder. In Norway: Dr. Jan Mohr; Dr. J. Schutz-Larsen. In the USA: Dr. Walter C. Alvarez. In each of these countries, and in others, a National Association for Mental Health or an equivalent group existed which was recruited into the fold by the WFMH. In Denmark, Louis Grandjean who had been Director of the Landsforeningen for Mentalhygiejne for 5 1/2 years wrote in 1954 "The Little Milieu" which was a study in family heredity. In the book he praises Herman Lundborg and Sren Hansen both notorious vice-presidents of the international Federation of Eugenic Organisations. Strup of the Danish "Landsforeningen" also had an interesting career. Immediately after the war he undertook a psychiatric study of Danes who had collaborated with the Nazis. The records and results on Strup's insistence were declared secret. The effect is that these results are not available to the public and no-one can identify the Nazi collaborators and what happened to them. In 1960 Eggert Petersen, former psychological-warfare operative in Danish Military Intelligence, was appointed director of the Danish "Landsforeningen". This may not be significant but it bears an amazing resemblance to the British NAMH. The professional associations of medical men and psychiatrists were not immediately recruited, as the
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Board of the WFMH over the years contained many of the top men from these same professional associations. Influence was easily brought to bear on the American Psychiatric Association, the Association of Neurologists and Psychiatrists, the Deutsche Gesellschaft fr Psychiatrie und Nervenheilkunde (Marburg), the Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, the Canadian Psychiatric Association and many more. Today many of these associations have joined the WFMH ranks of member and affiliated associations. There remain only a few professional groups in the mental sciences who are not swayed by the hypnotic command to "Kill". The influence of a huge professional body could not be halted by the mere death of over a quarter of a million mental patients and others, and at least a million Jews in the T4 extermination camps, it could only be slowed; but the ranks are reforming for the next social onslaught which this time may not be disguised by war but by charity. Lord Adrian, member of the Eugenics Society, the British NAMH and the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, expressed this kind of charity in a speech he gave in 1956: "...preventive health services are bound to interfere with individual liberty... and if they aim at mental as well as physical health they must be prepared to separate mothers from children and to supervise the lives of people who would like to be let alone."
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c) The experiments failed in their primary purpose of providing a cheap method of mass sterilisation or castration..." If we examine this condemnation more closely, it is easily recognised that had it been the case that an economical means of mass sterilisation had been discovered, the experiments could only have been condemned by reason of the first-named point. Apart from that, these three viewpoints implied that the development of a low-cost method of mass sterilisation would represent a worthwhile scientific product. Where and under what conditions could such a wonderful achievement be put to use? As if wishing to pursue his unspoken, logical train of thought, he recommends that the continuation of experimentation with one of the sterilisation-drugs which were being used by the Nazi doctors would be perfectly in order. The profound and immeasurable silence of the medical profession in regard to the German doctors does not find its foundation on a lack of knowledge about what happened. Today, sterilisations as well as euthanasia are encouraged for eugenic reasons by medical people, mainly psychiatrists, but of course now dressed in different garb. Just as the master builders of T4 went underground after the war and later emerged as members of the WFMH, so also did their ideals and their interests. Eugenics has made a comeback as a so-called experimental field whose products are test-tube babies, artificial insemination, and the like. Articles in the popular press, about artificial insemination and genetic engineering in the future, are very common today. Sterilisation has been resuscitated as part of the Planned Parenthood Programme. Whereas formerly one heard the cry, "If we don't do something soon we'll be inundated by people", and Malthus proclaimed, "If we don t control birth we'll run out of supplies of food", nowadays the call goes out, "If we don't start using birth control, we won t have anywhere to stand". The melody is the same, only the words have changed. Euthanasia has surfaced again as a charitable organisation dispensing "Death with Dignity", a new euphemism, with the aim of giving a person who is in a state of health which precludes any chance of being cured the opportunity of letting himself be killed, but of course only when he is complete agreement with the measure. In the case of mental unbalance, a relative can give consent. Once again the first signs of forced euthanasia are becoming visible, aimed at the mentally ill. Should anyone be interested in getting a picture of the current situation, he should have a look around his home country, and at neighbouring ones, for he will surely find something along the lines of: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. A (national) association for Mental Health A Eugenics society or group Some type of Abortion Reform League An association for Voluntary Sterilisation An association for Voluntary Euthanasia
If the members and committees of these associations are then cross-checked, he will see that: 1. Many names cross-check 2. A large percentage of the members of branches 3, 4, and 5 above stem from sections 1 and 2. 3. They constantly carry on mutual complementary propaganda. Take Great Britain as a concrete example. The directorate of the Abortion Law Reform Association is comprised of: Prof. Glanville Williams NAMH supporter and member of the Eugenics Society. Sir Julian Huxley NAMH supporter, an officer of the Eugenics Society and of the Euthanasia Society. Baroness Stocks member of the NAMH Galton Lecturer. Dr Eliot Slater member of the Eugenics Society - and many others.
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The Executive Committee of the Euthanasia Society: Lord Adrian member of the NAMH and of the Eugenics Society. Prof. Glanville Williams member of the NAMH and of the Eugenics Society. Sir Julian Huxley member of the NAMH and of the Eugenics Society. On the executive committee of the Birth Control Campaign figure among others: Prof. Eliot Slater member of the Eugenics Society. Baroness Stocks member of the NAMH and of the Eugenics Society. Prof. Glanville Williams member of the Eugenics Society and of the NAMH. Why this should be, the author doesn't know, but it is the medical men of such groups who provide the "scientific" rationale and methodology to justify and achieve the desired ends. In the U.S.A. in 1968 a voluntary euthanasia bill was introduced in Florida and an eminent surgeon and member of the American Medical Association - AMA - argued the case for it: A bill to be entitled An act relating to the right to die with dignity; providing an effective date. Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Florida: Section 1. All natural persons are equal before the law and have inalienable rights, among them the right to enjoy and defend life and liberty, to be permitted to die with dignity, to pursue happiness, to be rewarded for industry, and to acquire possess and protect property. No person shall be deprived of any right because of race religion or national origin. Section 2. Any person with the same formalities as required by law for the execution of a last will and testament, may execute a document directing that he shall have the right to death with dignity, and that his life shall not be prolonged beyond the point of a meaningful existence. Section 3. in the event any person is unable to make such a decision because of mental or physical incapacity, a spouse or person or persons of first degree kinship shall be allowed to make such a decision, provided written consent is obtained from: 1. The spouse or person of first degree kinship or 2. in the event of two (2) persons of first degree kinship both such persons or 3. in the event of three (3) or more persons of first degree kinship the majority of those persons. Section 4. If any person is disabled and there is no kinship as provided in section 3, death with dignity shall be granted any person if in the opinion of three (3) physicians the prolongation of life is meaningless. Section 5. Any document executed hereunder must be recorded with the clerk of the circuit court in order to be effective. Section 6. This act shall take effect upon becoming law. Fortunately this bill was not passed, and so far the AMA has been silent on the whole issue, but judging by the silence with which the German atrocities were met I can safety predict that the AMA will soon be unofficially espousing the cause of voluntary euthanasia. In 1935 the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association observed that the average doctor frequently faced the problem (of euthanasia) when it was a matter between him and his patient and he could decide in his own way without any interference. The principles and practices are exactly the same as those that the Nazi psychiatrists used. One British expert recently arguing the case for euthanasia even went so tar as to say that certain defectives are a
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burden to themselves and others (the State perhaps) and therefore should be put out of their misery.
South Africa
With the full support of the South African Council for Mental Health and the Association of Neurologists and Psychiatrists, South Africa, which is heavily inclined in this direction anyway, will have sterilisation laws introduced before long. At this time heavy propaganda for sterilisation is being promoted there as a continuation of S. Africa's early history. In 1930 H.B. Fantham, Professor of Zoology at Witwatersrand, wrote in Child Welfare Magazine: "...there must be limitations of multiplication of those definitely inferior or below average in inborn good qualities. In South Africa there must be limitations of the `poor white' element." In 1934 Dr. P.W. Laidler, Medical Officer for Health of East London, wrote an article for the "S.A. Tydskrif vir Geneeskundiges" called for a South African sterilisation law "on the lines of Germany". Some interesting quotes from his article: "It is the white man's deficients who drag him down." "The prevention of family is essential where stock is poor." "A lessening of the increase of the unfit would lighten the tax payer's burden." "We are overburdened with poor of normal minds and defectives. Possibly we are overburdened with better class minds." "Man continues to load himself with a burden of deficients." In October 1971 as this book was being written, Dr. Troskie an Executive member of the South African Medical and Dental Council called for the merciless elimination of weak genetic elements. He proposed the formation of a Genetic Committee composed of a judge and medical, sociological and religious experts to: "prevent those parents from leaving a burden on society. The committee will make the decision for them." This is apparently not a new idea in South Africa, as several groups are involved in a debate over whether there should be compulsory or voluntary sterilisation, and now a group of sociologists intend to approach the Prime Minister about the problem. The parallel between Nazi Germany and modern South Africa is very close.
U.S.A.
The Rockefeller institute that backs the AMA has produced devastating results at home and overseas. It was Rockefeller who financed the foundation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and gave Professor Rdin one whole floor of the building for his genetic research in the 20's. The German Mental Hygiene Movement was heavily subsidised by Rockefeller and thereby put into a healthy position to continue its aims and objectives to the bitter end. Further it was Dr. Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller institute and a Nobel Prize Winner who so loudly applauded the actions of the Germans and blatantly advocated the mass murder of mental patients and prisoners. Currently in the U.S. the psychiatric profession is making extensive use of prisoners as experimental material for medical experiments with AMA approval. The Rockefeller family continues to subsidise the Medical-Psychiatric professors and one of the Rockefellers is on the Board of the American National Association for Mental Health. In 1970 in Hawaii, a bill was introduced the exact wording of which was: A Bill for an Act Relating to Population Control. Section 1:
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The legislation finds 1. that population growth is the most serious and most challenging problem for mankind today; 2. that the time necessary for the population of the world to double is now about thirty-five years; 3. that the "death rate solution" by war famine or pestilence is an unacceptable destructive solution to the problem of birth control; 4. that population control is an acceptable humanitarian solution to the problem of population growth. The purpose of this Act is to control the population size of this State by a program of birth regulation. Section 2: Every physician attending a woman resident of this State at the time she is giving birth in the State shall, it the woman has two or more living children, perform such medical technique or operation as will render the woman sterile. Section 3: This Act shall take effect on July 1, 1971. Even amongst our neighbours trends in this direction can be recognised. In Switzerland it was Dr. Andr Repond who had applauded Germany's efforts, and had been so proud of his own work in ensuring that only eugenically sound marriages took place in one of the Swiss cantons. The question of euthanasia and sterilisation are not problems of yesterday to be discussed at club-meetings or amongst intellectuals as philosophic or historic subjects. The psychiatrists as strong as ever, have begun to agitate more and more loudly for the right to sterilise and kill. In July 1972 Dr. T.L. Pilkington in "The Practitioner" called for yet further murders to be committed. "...there seem to be clear indications that technologically developed nations will be rapidly obliged to review the complexity of the life that they create, embark on a modern eugenic programme designed to steepen the tail of the graph of the normal I.Q. distribution below 100 or consider some form of legalised euthanasia. It is possible, of course, that the final `solution' will combine all these with increasing methods of specific prevention. The Death March has again begun.
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Author's Note
When I decided to write this book, I intended simply to record the events in Germany as a warning against similar occurrences which could take place in other countries. Shortly after I had begun to familiarise myself with the subject, I realised that I faced a problem which had already reached international proportions and which had even then deeply entrenched itself in Great Britain. I spent 5 years in England and overseas in order to research the information which I am now making public. Perhaps I ought to have written two books; perhaps I should have proceeded with my investigations until every volume was fully documented-I do not know. Yet the fact remains that the psychiatrists and "socially conscious" groups whose hands are stained with the blood of millions of people, and who have created an atmosphere in which similar events could happen in every other part of the world, are still alive today, and are pursuing the same professions as before, only in a form that is more disguised. This book would not contain as much material about England if my enquiries had not led me there. Others may feel the desire to carry my work further - and I would honestly like to stimulate this. The current activities of psychiatrists must be seen in a new light when we take into consideration the fact that their allegedly charitable goals could be a cloak of Invisibility designed to camouflage their ominous purposes in the face of their fellow men. The psychiatrists began early on to bring their own private secret service to life and to infiltrate governments. I do not wish to elucidate in detail the oft-mentioned theory that Hitler was brought to power through the action of a secret group. For those who want to do further research into this, this book may be of considerable direct importance. In the "Archives for Racial and Social Biology", Volume 25, 1931, the psychiatrist Prof. F. Lenz clarifies Hitler's "Mein Kampf". He quotes Hitler abundantly, and establishes that Hitler is the man to finally grant Racial Hygiene its rightful place. The conveniently-accepted opinion is that Hitler was the embodiment of all evil who forced his subjects against their will to perform the historically "singular" atrocities of the Third Reich. This consideration is not only imperfect: it also leads deliberately away from the facts and twists them. It seems impossible that one man could draw 60 million people under his spell, and make them indifferent to such mass slaughter as was brought about by the psychiatrists under the Third Reich, without some support; even if only from some private interest group. From the article by Lenz it is obvious how the would-be mass butchers, favoured by Hitler at least since 1931, had already carried out moral reconditioning on their stout-hearted puppet. For Lenz himself says in this article about "Mein Kampf" "Naturally the ideas which Hitler outlines here are not new". No, they certainly were not new, but with Hitler as a puppet, the psychiatrists for the first time found themselves in the position of being able to transform their secret objectives and interests into reality. Lenz closes his article with the words: "I would like to sum up by saying: Hitler is the first politician of really great influence who has recognised Racial Hygiene as a principal obligation for all politics, and who wants to stand up for it energetically." Whether or not psychiatry was the sole private interest group which aided Hitler to power has yet to be explored in detail. It is a fact that Hitler took their watchwords literally. However, even the psychiatrists
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themselves did not have so tight a grip on Hitler as to make him give them a free hand for their mass murders, for they had to go about their murder activities behind his back and without his direct consent. Hitler had barely come to power when the "Deutsche Verband fr psychische Hygiene" (German Union for Mental Health), at a session held on the 16th of July, 1933, changed not only its name to the "Deutscher Verband far psychische Hygiene und Rassenhygiene" (German institute for Mental Health and Racial Hygiene) but also its officers. Prof. Dr. Sommer stepped back and Hitler-supporter Ernst Rdin took over the leadership. It is evident from the memorial notice published by Rdin for the deceased Ploetz in the "Archiv fr Rassen und Gesellschaftsbiologie" (Archives for Racial and Social Biology), 1940, V olume I, just how much Hitler had taken up the racial hygiene theories of his masters. Rdin writes: "It is tragic fate that Ploetz is no longer alive to witness the solution to the problem of understanding and co-operation among the Nordic peoples, he, who believed so unshakeably in the resolute leadership of Adolf Hitler and in his holy mission of national and international racial hygiene." Hitler was an evil man and no one would want to assert that he was not responsible for the things that happened in Germany, but in blaming Hitler for all the evils one is overlooking a considerable number of those who are truly responsible, people who are being allowed to pursue their course to similar ends all over again- nothing to stop them. I do not claim to understand their motives. Perhaps a clergyman would. No one is forcing them to obey orders nowadays - they wouldn't obey them anyway - and still the pattern remains unchanged. Fascism and Nazism were solving the problems - with violence - and so were the psychiatrists. The Nazis may have been disbanded, but the psychiatrists still linger on among us. Maybe this is the secret weapon Goebbels boasted about which would lead to the rebirth of the Reich - not a super-bomb and not a death ray, but a blueprint for a psychiatric slave state.
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Bibliography
JOURNALS REPORTS AND ANNUAL REPORTS ALEXANDER, LEO, Neuropathology and Neurophysiology, including Electro-encephalography, in Wartime Germany. CIOS Item 24 File No XXVII-1 London (No date). ALEXANDER, LEO, Public Mental Health Practices in Germany: Sterilisation and Execution of Patients Suffering from Nervous or Mental Disease. CIOS Item 24 File No XXVIII-50. London (No date). BAUR, E., FISCHER, E., and LENZ, F., Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene. Band I: Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre. Band II: Menschliche Auslese und Rassenhygiene (Eugenik) Munchen 1927 and 1931. BINDING, K, and HOCHE, A., Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens. Leipzig, 1920. BON, G., LE., Psychologie der Massen. 1908. BUMKE, O., KOLB, G., ROEMER, H., and KAHN, E., (Herausgegeben) Handwrterbuch der Psychischen Hygiene und der Psychiatrischen Fsgorge. Berlin, 1931. CARREL, A., Der Mensch das Unbekannte Wesen. Stuttgart. CATEL, W., Grenzsituationen des Lebens. Nrnberg, 1962. CHAMBERLAIN, H.S., Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Munchen, 1B99. DARWIN, C.R., Die Abstammung des Menschen und die Buchtwahl in Geschlechtlicher Beziehung. Leipzig, (No date) 18-? DARWIN, C.R., Die Entstehung der Arten Durch Natrliche Zuchtwahl. Leipzig 18-? DAS DEUTSCHE FUHRERLEXIKON 1934/1935. Berlin, 1934. v. ECKARDT, M., and VILLINGER, W., (Herausgegeben). Gesundheit und Mitmenschliche Beziehungen (Bericht Ober die Internationale Tagung in Hiddesen bei Detmold 2-7 August 1951). Munchen, 1953. EHRHARDT, H., Euthanasie und Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens. Stuttgart 1965. FEST, J., Das Gesicht des Dritten Reiches. Munchen, 1963. FLUGEL, J.C., (Editor) International Congress on Mental Health, London, 1948 (4 volumes) London, 1948. GOBINEAU, A., Versuch ber die Unglsichheit der Menschenrassen. Stuttgart, 1898. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE, Trails of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (Kriegsverbrecherprozesse vor den Nrnberger Militrgerichten) 13 Vols. Washington, 1951-1952. GUTT, A., RDIN, E., and RUTTKE, F., Gesetz zur Verhtung Erbkranken Nachwuchses vom 14. Juli 1933. Munich, 1934.
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HARSCH, J.C., Pattern for Conquest. London, 1942. HILBERG, R., The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago, 1961. HITLER, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Munich, 1940. HOFF, H., and ARNOLD, O.H., Germany and Austria. In Bellak, L., Contemporary European Psychiatry. New York, 1961. HONOLKA, B., Die Kreuzeischreiber: Arzte ohne Gewissen. Euthanasie im Dritten Reich. Hamburg, 1961. JOSIAH MACY, JR. FOUNDATION. Health and Human Relations in Germany. (Report of the Second Conference on Problems of Health and Human Relations in Germany. Held at the Williamsburg Lodge, Williamsburg, Virginia, U.S.A. December 10-15, 1950). New York. JOSIAH MACY, JR. FOUNDATION. Health and Human Relations (Report of a Conference on Health and Human Relations Held at Hiddesen Near Detmold, Germany, August 2-7, 1951). New York, 1953. KINTNER, E.W., (Editor) Trial of Alfons Klein, Adolf Wahlmann et al. (The Hadamar Trial). London, 1949. KRAUSNICK, H., BUCHHEIM, H., BROSZAT, M., and JACOBSEN, H.A., Anatomie des SS-Staates. Olten und Freiburg im Breisgau, 1965. LAPOUGE, V. DE, Der Arier und seine Bedeutung fr die Gemeinschaft. Frankfurt a. M., 1939. MALTHUS, T.R., Versuch ber das Bevlkerungs-Gesetz. 1807 and 1964. MASER, W., Hitler's Mein Kampf, 1966. MITSCHERLICH, A., and MIELKE, F., Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit. Heidelberg, 1949. PLATEN-HALLERMUND, A., Die Ttung Geisteskranker in Deutschland. Frankfurt, 1948. PLOETZ, A., Grundlinien einer Rassenhygiene. Berlin, 1895. REITLINGER, G., Die Endlsung. Berlin, 1956. SEMMEL, B., Imperialism and Social Reform. London, 1960. SHIRER, W.L., Berlin Diary. The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941. London, 1941. SIMPSON, G.E., Darwin and Social Darwinism. In Clough, Gay and Warner, The European Past. N.Y., 1964. SPENCER, H., Social Statics. N.Y., 1954. STODARD, L., Into the Darkness. Nazi Germany Today. London, 1941. TERNON, Y., and HELMAN, S., Histoire de la Mdecine SS ou le Mythe du Racisme Biologique. Paris, 1969. TERNON, Y., and HELMAN, S., Le Massacre des Alins. Paris, 1971. WEINRICH, MAX. Hitler's Professors. New York, 1946. WERTHAM, F., A Sign for Cain. London, 1966.
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WILLIAMS, F.E., Proceedings of the First International Congress on Mental Hygiene (Held at Washington D.C., U.S.A. May 5th to 10th, 1930) 2 Vols. NY, 1932.
JOURNALS
Mental Health (UK) Der Nervenarzt (G) Zeitschrift fr Psychische Hygiene (G) Archiv fr Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie (G) Eugenics Review (UK)
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Index to Appendix
Disclaimer I have tried as far as possible to copy the book faithfully. In some cases this has resulted in refrences which lead nowhere. If this is the case I beg your pardon - If you know where they should lead please inform me and I will correct the text. Thank you. Liz Toolan 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. Sterilisation in the United States to 1957 The Eugenics Education Society Board 1915-1916 Picture Archive The "Scientific" Works on which Professor Lenz bases his work. Archiv fr Rassenhygiene. (English Translation) Archiv fr Rassenhygiene. (Original German) On the Occasion of Hitler's Birthday (English and German) The War Forced Upon Us and Racial Hygiene (English Translation) The War Forced Upon Us and Racial Hygiene (Original German) The Perfection of Great Germany (English and German) Duties and Aims of the German Society for Racial Hygiene (English and German) The Fhrer thanks Rdin. (English and German) Strategic Planning for Mental Health. By Colonel J. R. Rees, M.D. - Summary of an address given at the Annual Meeting of the National Council for Mental Hygiene on June 18th, 1940. Vorwort - Hoff's Preface to the book "Euthanasia and the Destruction of 'Life Unworthy' Life" by Helmut Ehrhardt. The Relation of National Socialism to Racial Hygiene (Original German) The Relation of National Socialism to Racial Hygiene (English Translation) A Final Tribute to Ploetz (English and German) ... ... ...
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Dates indicate the year in which the law was first passed; later revisions or amendments are not shown.
Sterilisations Reported
Per 100,000 Population (2) 1956 Georgia North Carolina Delaware Virginia Iowa North Dakota Oregon Utah South Carolina 7.22 4.88 2.98 2.38 2.26 2.13 1.98 1.84 1.83 New Hampshire Indiana Arizona Minnesota Nebraska Michigan Connecticut Sough Dakota Mississippi 1.43 0.83 0.76 0.59 0.56 0.36 0.31 0.29 0.28 California West Virginia Maine Winsconsin Idaho Kansas Montana Oklahoma Vermont 0.17 0.15 0.11 0.03 0 0 0 0 0
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*Kansas *Maine *Michigan Minnesota Mississippi *Montana *Nebraska New Hampshire *North Carolina *North Dakota Oklahoma *Oregon South Carolina *South Dakota Utah Vermont Virginia West Verginia Wisconsin 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
X X -
X X X X X X X X X X X X X X
X X X -
X X X X X -
X X X -
Consent of defective person, spouse or guardian required. Consent of defective person not required. Law contains provision for either voluntary or compulsory. Law contains provision for Individuals outside of institutions. Authorisation agency for sterilisation operation. (Other states' operations passed on by designated agencies.)
224 129 95 1 30 10 20 24 10 14 25 19,985 10,131 9,854 11,683 5,936 5,747 3 542 45 497 414 21 393 871 449 422 278 207 71 263 2,490 1,023 1,467 1,855 786 1,069 2 33 8 25 12 2 10 94 2,325 1,148 1,177 609 302 307 47 1,682 488 1,194 788 274 514 - 3,025 1,763 1,262 2,063 1,219 853 26 305 44 261 21 6 15 61 3,550 993 2,617 427 76 351
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19 6 8 8 216 14 38 43 2 15 87 3 1
9 15 4 289 16 1 28 30 2 9 111 33 -
2,313 602 256 852 670 42 4,472 961 556 2,177 201 779
1,902 58 214 679 372 2,826 546 250 1,239 123 738
1 3 1 77 13 36 6 9 82 4 2 1
14 6 52 235 23 77 1 12 19 73 2 21 -
North Carolina North Dakota Oklahoma Oregon South Carolina South Dakota Utah Vermont Virginia Washington
(3)
481 2,345 211 51 454 12 268 335 199 785 111 470
732 336 396 252 83 169 6,683 2,640 4,043 685 98 1,793 184 15 501 83
620 292 328 211 73 138 3,113 1,238 1,875 276 52 1,784 33 11 243 41
392 1,401
386 1,398
901 1,067 59,186 23,667 35,519 26,525 11,660 14,865 30,500 10,860 19,640 2,161 1,147 1,014
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Elected Vice-Presidents
Dr. Richard Arthur M.L.A., President, New South Wales Branch Sir James Barr, President, Liverpool Branch. Dr. Benham, President, Dunedin Branch. Mr. H. W. Blshop, S.M., President, Christchurch Branch. Sir James Crichton-Browne, F.R.S., Ex-President, 1908-9 Bishop D'arcy, President, Belfast Branch. Professor Starr Jordan, President, Eugenic Section, American Genetic Asso-ciation. Professor H. B. Kirk, M.A., President, Wellington Branch. Mr. W. C. Marshall, M.A., Presideat, Haslemere Branch. The Rt. Hon. Lord Moulton, P.C., F.R.S., President, Birmingiam Heredity Society. Mr. J. L. Otter, J.P., President, Brighton Branch. M. Edmond Perrier, President, Soeit Franaise, D'eugnique. Drt. A. Ploetz, President, International Society For Race Hygiene. Professor E. B. Poulton, F.R.S., President, Oxford Branch. Professor Sergi, President Comitato Italiano Per Gli Studi Di Eugenica. Professor Seward, F.R.S. Presideat, Cambridge Eugenics Society. Bishop W Elldon, President, Manchester Branch.
Hon. Members
The Rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour, P.C. Sir Archibald Geikie, F.R.S. Her Grace, The Duchess Or Marlborough.
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Lady Barrett. Mr. Crofton Black. Sir E. Brabrook, C.B. Mrs. Theodore Chambers. Hon. Sir John Cockburn, K.C.M.G. Miss E. Corry. Mr. R. Newton Crane Mr. A. E. Crawley. Slr H. Cunningham, K.C.I.E Dr. Langdon Down. Mr. Havelock Ellis. Professor J. Findlay. Mr. E. G. Wheler Galton. Dr. Greenwood. Dr. W. Hadley. Mrs. Henderson. Colonel Hills. F.R.S. Very Rev. W. R. Inge, D.D., Dean ....of St. Paul's Miss Kirby
Mr. Ernest Lane, F.R.C.S. Professor MacBride. Lady Owen Mackenzie. Mr. Robert Mond. Dr. F. W. Mott, F.R.S. Mr. G. P. Mudge. Mrs. G. Pooley Dr. Archdall Reid. Blt. John Russell. Mr. F. C. S. Schiller, D. Sc. Professor A. Schuster, F.R.S. Mr. Edgar Schuster, D.Sc. Dr. C. G. Seligman. Professor Spearman. Professor J. A. Thomson. Dr. A. F. Tredgold. Mrs. Alec Tweedie Mr. W.C. Whitham, F.R.S. Dr. Douglas White
Belfast. Professor J. A. Lindsay. Birmingham. Mr. Cary Gilson. Mr. Humphrey Humphreys. Mr. P. Mills. Brighton. Mr. A. J. Hall. Haslemere. Sir. W. C. Marshall.
Liverpool. Mr. R. T. Bodey. Mr. R. D. Laurie Alderman T. R. Bulley. Manchester. Dr. Mumford. New South Wales. (To Be Appointed.) New Zealand. Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington. Hon. T. A. Mackenzie. (High Commissioner). Oxford. Mr. E. Schuster, D.Sc.
The Board of the English Eugenics Education Society 1915-1916. Ploetz was an elected Vice-President.
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(Copy of Page 87 "Eugenics Education Society, 1916 " from the original book "The Men Behind Hitler")
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Original Text
Es ist ein tragisches Geschick, da Ploetz die Lsung des Problems der Verstndigung und Zusammenarbeit der nordischen Vlker nicht mehr erlebte, er, der an die zielbewute Fhrung Adolf Hitlers, an dessen heilige, nationale und internationale rassenhygienische Mission so felsenfest glaubte. Aber es mag ein Trost fr uns sein, da er bis zu seinem letzten Atemzuge in unerschtterlicher Hoffnung am Waffensieg des deutschen Volkes und im darauffolgendem Frieden am Glauben an den weiteren Siegeszug auch der Rassenhygiene festhielt. Rdin /BLOCKQUOTE> email [email protected] Return to Appendix Index Return to Introduction Return to Table of Contents Return To Liz Toolan's Homepage
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Picture Archive
Nuremberg rally. Gesetz fur Verhtung erbkranken Nachwuchtes: Law for the prevention Hereditary Diseases in Posterity. Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene: Human Hereditary Teaching and Racial Hygiene. Archiv fr Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie: Archive for Racial and Social Biology Die Entmannungen in Mainfranken in den Jahren 1934-1936 Sterilisation in Mainfranken in the years 1934-1936 Hitler Revisits his Former Prison The Transport lists of T4 Dr. Adolf Wahlmann Hadamar Institution. Ward 1B The Killing Centres The Medical Machine of Destruction Extermination Camp Treblinka.
Nuremberg rally.
How many of these people later served as guards in the eugenic death camps?
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Transport Lists.
This is what the transport lists of T4 looked like.
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Hadamar Institution.
Front view of the Hadamar Institution. Quietly and Peacefully ...
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"Scientific" Works
LITERATUR ZUM ZWEITEN BANDE. 579 49 Schuster, E., Eugenics, London nd Glasgow 1913 (264 S.) 50. Siemens, H. W., Vererbungslehre, Rassenhygiene und Bevlkerungspolitik. 4. Aufl. Lehmann, Mnchen 1930 (147 S. oktav.) 51 Stoddard, L, Tbe Revolt against Civilization New York 1922 Deutsche bersetzung: Der Kulturumsturz. Die Drohung des Untermenschen. Mnchen 1925 (212 S., gemeinverstndliche, packende Werbeschrift.) 52 Wiggam, A. E., The next Age of Man. Indianapolis 1927 (418 S.) II. Bcher zum ersten Abschnitt des zweiten Bandes. 53 Ammon, O., Die natrliche Auslese beim Menschen. Jena 1893 (326 S.) 54 --Die Gesellschaftsordnung und ihre natrlichen Grundlagen. 1 Aufl. 1895, 3 Aufl. 1910 (262 S. Historisch bedeutsames Werk ber die soziale Auslese.) 55 Carr- Saunders, A. M, The Population Problem. Oxford 1922 (516 S. mit sehr vielem historischen und ethnologischen Material.) 56 --Population. London 1925 (111 S., oktav.) 57. Darr, R. W., Das Bauerntum a1s Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse. Lehmann, Mnchen 1929 (482 S) 58. Eisler, A, Sozialbiologie. Bevlkerungswissenschaft und Gesellschaftshygiene. Berlin u. Leipzig 1923 (483 S.; in mancher Hinsicht anfechtbar, enthlt aber wertvolles Material.) 59 Gobineau, J.A. Graf von, Versuch ber die Ungleichheit der Menschenrassen. Deutsche bersetzung von L. Schemann, Stuttgart 1898 (1853-55 erschienenes Werk, von historischer Bedeutung.) 60 Grant, M., The Passing of the Great Race. 2. Aufl. New York 1918 (296 S.; deutsche bersetzung:, `Der Untergang der groen Rasse', Mnchen 1925; modernes amerikanisches Werk im Geiste Gobineaus.) 61 Gnther, H. F. K., Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes. 12 Aufl. Mnchen 1928 (509 S., behandelt auch die Auslesevorgnge.) 62 --Rassengeschichte des hellenischen und des rmischen Volkes. Mnchen 1929 (130 S.) 63 --Rassenkunde des jdischen Volkes. Lehmann, Mnchen 1930 (352 S.) 64 Hartnacke, W., Naturgrenzen geistiger Bildung. Leipzig 1930 (212 S., enthlt wertvolles Material ber soziale Auslese.) 65 Just, G., Vererbung und Erziehung. Berlin 1930 (233 S., mit Beitrgen von 7 Mitarbeitern, in Einzelheiten anfechtbar, im ganzen aber wertvoll.) 66 de Lapouge, V., Les slections sociales. Paris 1896 (503 S.). 67 Marcuse, M., Der eheliche Prventivverkehr, seine Verbreitung, Verursachung und Methodik, dargestellt und beleuchtet an 300 Ehen. Stuttgart 1917. 68 Niceforo, A., Anthropologie der nichtbesitzenden Klassen. Deutsche bersetzung Leipzig 1910 (Bedeutsames Werk zur sozialen Auslese mit wichtigem Originalmaterial.) Professor Lenz bases his work on the "scientific" works of such authorities: Stoddard, American racist; Ammon, German racist; Darr, later Nazi Minister of Agriculture; Gobineau, French racist; Grant, American racist: Gnther, crude German racist: de Lapouge, French racist and racial hygienist
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(Copy of Page 91 "LITERATUR ZUM ZWEITEN BANDE." from the original book "The Men Behind Hitler")
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Archiv fr Rassenhygiene.
English Translation
On the Development of the third Reich since the Seizure of Power by our Fhrer on January the Both 1933.
This short synopsis which is directed mainly at our foreign reader can only serve the purpose of pointing out the most important advances directly or indirectly concerning our areas of Racial and Social Biology and Racial and Social Hygiene. These are areas which Adolf Hitler has pointed out to be the most important foundations of our racial and state life. The reforms began with the passage of the law for "The Prevention of Hereditarily Ill Descendants" on the 14th of July 1933. According to this law, anyone who is hereditarily ill can be made barren (sterilised) when in the view of medical science it could be expected on a high probability that his descendants would suffer from grievous physical and mental hereditary defects. This was followed by "The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour" on the 15th of September 1935. By this all marriages and extra marital relationships between Jews and citizens of German stock or related stock was forbidden. This was followed by the "Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health" of the German People (The Marriage Health Law) on the 18th of October 1935, whereby a marriage could not be undertaken if one of the betrothed is suffering from a contagious illness whereby severe damage to the health of the other party is to be feared. Also when one of the betrothed couple has been incapacitated or is under tutelage, or when one of the betrothed couple without being incapacitated suffers from a mental defect, which makes the marriage undesirable for the racial community and when one of the betrothed suffers from a hereditary disease by the definitions given in the "Law for The Prevention of Hereditarily Ill descendants." Before undertaking the marriage the couple must prove by attestation of the Health Office, that no reason exists for the prevention of the marriage under law. The diligent enforcement of these laws has been made easier and more possible through supplements, regulations and commentaries, and their application has caused many beneficial results for the populace, results whose full effect will be felt in the future. Further racial hygienic measures were the marriage loans and child support laws especially for families with many children. These have led to an increase of the birth-rate which was declining strongly. The education of German Youth in mental, spiritual and physical respects is being undertaken more and more independently of religion and alien racial influence, and is more under the control of the state. This ensures the growth and the preservation of the national-socialist spirit, which is already influenced to a great degree by state and party organisations. The Jewish part of the population which influences our cultural life so strongly, and often even controls it, has been driven back strongly in the Wehrmacht, in the economy, in the judiciary, among teachers of all kinds and levels, in the press, in the theatre and in the film industry. Unemployment which was burdening our race so, heavily has been done away with except for relatively small sections, and the position of the working classes especially as regards health, economy and social services has been greatly improved.
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The safeguarding of our race in its racial progress was further assisted by the withdrawal from the League of Nations and the daring declaration that made null and void the Treaties of Versailles and of St. Germain, steps which made strong protective measures possible for the German Reich such as the creation of a large modern Wehrmacht, the resolute occupation of the Rhineland by German troops, the German Japanese - Italian unification against Communism and the creation of the "Axis" German Reich - Italy and finally the wonderful reunification of Austria with the German Reich. This brought about not only an increase of military, economic and cultural possibilities, but above all it realised the old desire of the Germans in the Reich and in Austria to be united for all times in a Greater Germany. These are some of the major points of the stupendous achievements of our Fhrer and his faithful followers! Through his deeds Hitler moves up into the ranks of our greatest leaders since oldest times! Our people have realised this and are devoted to him with grateful hearts. No German prince, no German king or emperor has ever been loved so passionately by his whole people as Adolf Hitler. Alfred Ploetz. Ernst Rdin
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Archiv fr Rassenhygiene.
Original German
Zur Entwicklung des Deutschen Reichs seit der Machtbernahme unseres Fhrers am 30.Januar 1933.
Es kann sich in dieser kurzen bersicht, die hauptsachlich fr unsere auslndischen Leser bestimmt ist, nur darum handeln, auf die wichtigsten Fortschritte hinzuweisen, die direkt oder indirekt auf unserem Gebiet der Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie sowie der Rassen- und Gesellschaftshygiene erfolgt sind, einem Gebiet, das von Adolf Hitler als die wichtigste Grundlage unseres vlkischen und staatlichen Lebens hingestellt worden ist Die Reformen begannen mit dem Erla des Gesetzes zur Verhtung erbkranken Nachwuchses vom 14. Juli 1933. Nach diesem Gesetz kann, wer erbkrank ist, durch chirurgischen Eingriff oder andere Verfahren unfruchtbar gemacht (sterilisiert) werden, wenn nach den Erfahrungen der rztlichen Wissenschaft mit groer Wahrscheinlichkeit zu erwarten ist, da seine Nachkommen an schweren krperlichen oder geistigen Erbschden leiden werden. Dem vorstehenden Gesetz folgte das Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre vom 15. September 1935. Dadurch wurden Eheschlieungen und auerehelicher Verkehr zwischen Juden und Staatsangebrigen deutschen oder artverwandten Blutes verboten. Ferner folgte das Gesetz zum Schutz der Erbgesundheit des deutschen Volkes (das Ehegesundheitsgesetz) vom 18. Oktober 1935, wonach eine Ehe nicht geschlossen werden darf, wenn einer der Verlobten an einer mit Ansteckungsgefahr verbundenen Krankheit leidet, die eine erhebliche Schdigung der Gesundheit des anderen Teiles oder der Nachkommen befrchten lt; wenn einer der Verlobten entmndigt ist oder unter vorlufiger Vormundschaft steht; wenn einer der Verlobten, ohne entmndigt zu sein, an einer geistigen Strung leidet, die die Ehe fr die Volksgemeinschaft unerwnscht erscheinen lt, und wenn einer der Verlobten an einer Erbkrankheit im Sinne des Gesetzes zur Verhiitung erbkranken Nachwuchses leidet. Vor der Eheschlieung haben die Verlobten durch ein Zeugnis des Gesundheitsamtes nachzuweisen, da ein Ehehindernis im Sinne des Gesetzes nicht vorliegt Alle diese Gesetze sind durch Nachtrge, Verordnungen und Kommentare in ihrer sorgfltigen Durchfhrung erleichtert und ermglicht worden und haben Strme von wohlttigen Wirkungen aus ihrer Anwendung im Volk aus sich hervorgehen lassen, Wirkungen, die sich in ihrer vollen Kraft erst in der nahen und besonders in der fernen Zukunft entfalten werden. Weitere rassenhygienische Manahmen waren die zahlreichen Ehestandsdarlehen und Kinderbeihilfen in den Familien besonders der Kinderreichen, die zu einer bedeutenden Erhhung der in starkem Rckgang gewesenen deutschen Geburtenziffer fhrten Die Erziehung der deutschen Jugend in geistiger, seelischer und krperlicher Beziehung wurde und wird weiter in steigendem Mae unabhngig von konfessioneller und fremdrassiger Leitung durchgefhrt und dem Staate unterstellt. Dadurch werden das Wachsen und die Erhaltung des nationalsozialistischen Geistes, die schon ohnehin durch staatliche und parteiliche Organisation weitgehend beeinflut sind, dauernd sichergestellt Der unser Kultur- und staatliches Leben so stark beeinflussende, ja vielfach beherrschende jdische Bevlkerungsteil wurde stark zurck gedrngt, so in der Wehrmacht, in der Wirtschaft, im Richterstande, bei den Lehrern aller Arten und Stufen, in der Presse, im Theater, im Film. Die schwer auf unserem Volke lastende Arbeitslosigkeit wurde bis auf relativ geringe Reste
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heruntergesetzt und die Lage der arbeitenden Klassen berhaupt in gesundheitlicher, wirtschaftlicher und sozialer Beziehung stark gehoben. Die Sicherung unseres Volkes bei seiner rasslichen Aufwrtsbewegung wurde weiter bewirkt durch den Austritt aus dem Vlkerbunde, die khne Null- und Nichtigerklrung der Vertrge von Versailles und St. Germain, Schritte, die starke Schutzmanahmen fr das Deutsche Reich ermglichten, wie die Schaffung einer groen modernen Wehrmacht, wie die entschlossene Besetzung des Rheinlandes durch Einmarsch deutscher Truppen, wie die deutsch-japanisch-italienische Eini-gung gegen den Kommunismus und die Schaffung der ,,Achse" Deutsches Reich- Italien und wie schlielich die wunderbare Wiedervereinigung sterreichs mit dem Deutschen Reich, die nicht nur einen starken Zuwachs an militrischen, wirtschaftlichen und kulturellen Mg-lichkeiten bedeutete, sondern vor allem die alte Sehnsucht der Deutschen im Reich und in sterreich verwirklichte, fr immer und alle Zeiten zu einem Grodeutschland zusammenzuschmelzen. Dieses einige Hauptteile des gewaltigen Werkes unseres Fhrers und seiner Getreuen! Hitler rckt durch seine Taten in die Reihe unserer grten Fhrer seit den ltesten Zeiten! Unser Volk hat das erkannt und hngt ihm mit dankbarem Herzen an. Kein deutscher Frst, kein deutscher Knig oder Kaiser ist jemals von seinem ganzenVolke so leidenschaftlich geliebt worden wie Adolf Hitler. Alfred Ploetz. Archiv f. Rassen- u. Ges.-Biol. Bd. 32, Heft 2. Ernst Rdin
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Notizen
Der uns aufgezwungene Kreig und die Rassenhygiene
Ein moderner Krieg, ob siegreich bestanden oder nicht, bedeutet, wie jeder Rassenhygieniker wei, fr alle betroffenen Nationen eine furchtbare Gegenauslese, die Vernichtung einer Blte von gerade besonders tchtigen jungen Menschen im Beginn der Fortpflanzungszeit. Durch disen Massentod fllt nicht blo die an ihre eigene Person geknpfte Kulturleistung fort, sondern auch ihre gesamte Nachkommenschaft, welche sie ohne Krieg gezeugt htte. Diesem nur sehr schwer wider gutzumachenden Schaden gegenber kommt als Nutzen fr das Erbgut der Rasse die selektorische Ausmerze minderwertiger Anlagen in einem modernen Kriege sehr viel weniger, und heute sehr viel weniger als je, in Betracht. Denn die mit Hunger und Seuchen, d. h. mit stark selektorisch ausmerzend wirkenden, Kranke und organisch mangelhaft Veranlagte besonders hart treffenden Faktoren einhergehenden Kriege sind sehr viel seltener geworden, da heute Hygiene und Lebensmittelverteilungs-Organisation bei den meisten Kulturnationen so vollendet arbeiten, da erblich defekte und krank Weranlagte gegenber den Normalen in heutigen Kriegen wohl nicht mehr so stark benachteiligt sein drften wie in frheren. So wird also die rassenhygiene-feindliche Wirkung eines modernen Krieges heute nur noch verstrkt. Man sollte meinen, das solche fr das Blhen der Kulturvlker auch in der Zukunft magebenden berlegungen den gegenwrtigen Krieg htten verhindern sollen. Die deutschen Rassenhygieniker haben denn auch seit Jahrzehnten und seit der Grndung des Dritten Reiches in verstrktem Mae gegenber den anderen Kulturnationen und insbesondere auch gegenber England und Frankreich keinen Zweifel darber gelassen, da ein Krieg zwischen ihnen neben allen anderen Schrecken immer auch einen gegenseitigen rassenhygienischen Vernichtungskampf bedeuten wrde, und da daher der Friede, ein friedliches Zusammenarbeiten, ja wir knnen auch ruhig sagen, ein friedlicher fruchtbarer Wettbewerb im Interesse aller kulturell schpferischen und verwandten Vlker liege. Auch die deutschen Gelehrten berhaupt, die Politiker, die Staatsmnner, lieen es in diplomatischen Verhandlungen, in Wirtschafts- und Handels-konferenzen, in internationalen wissenschaftlichen und anderen Vereinigungen und Kongressen an keinen Vorschlgen und immer wieder unermdlich angesetzten Versuchen fehlen, eine friedliche Zusammenarbeit sicherzustellen. Ein grausames Geschick hat es nicht zugelassen, diese Bemhungen mit Erfolg zu krnen. Eine unheilschwangere Fehlsteuerung eines Teils der europischen Kulturpolitik hat es gewollt, da verhltnismssig dnne, aber mchtige und rcksichtslose Schichten des englischen und franzsischen Volkes in, wie es sich gezeigt hat, unberwindlicher Eifersucht auf den Freiheits- und Unabhngigkeitsdrang des deutschen Volkes und in unerschtterlicher Absicht die vllige Hegemonie ber das deutsche Volk wieder zu erringen und zu verstrken bis zur vlligen militrischen, politischen, wirtschaftlichen und finanziellen Ohnmacht Deutschlands. Anfangs wurde von diesen Schichten dem deutschen Freiheitsdrang noch das berchtigte HeuchelArgument des "Kampfes fr die Freiheit der kleinen Vlker" entgegengesetzt. Auch die abgegriffene tglich und stndlich als natur-unwahr erwiesene franzsische Revolutionsparole der Freiheit, Gleichheit und Brderlichkeit unter allen Menschen sollte die jedem Denkenden und Geschichtskundigen klar erwieseben. So gibt es fr das nationalsozialistisch geeinte und durchorganisierte Deutschland zur eines: den ihm von Englands kriegsinteressierten Schichten und Juden und seinen entsprechenden franzsischen Trabantenschichten aufgezwungenen und feierlich angesagten Krieg auch mit Krieg zu beantworten. In Deutschland, das von dem zielbewuten Freiheitswillen seines Fhrers geleitet und das ihm in allen seinen Schichten in diesem Ringen bis zum Sieg die Treue halten wird, gibt es heute nur ein gemeinsames Ziel: Kampf gegen den uns aufgezwungenen Krieg bis zur absoluten Sicherung unserer Freiheit und unseres
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Lebensraumes. Gewi, wir denken nach wie vor rassenhygienisch, woll wir das ewige Deutschland wollen. Deshalb wollen und mssen wir als Freie siegen und weiterleben! Dann auch werden wir, das ist unsere feste Zuversicht, im Frieden die Schden des Krieges durch um so folgerichtigere Rassenhygiene in unserem Volks wieder gut machen knnen. Ploetz. Rdin
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Ernst Rdin
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has ever been loved so passionately by his whole people as Adolf Hitler. Alfred Ploetz. Ernst Rdin
Rdin and Ploetz praise Hitler as the greatest Fhrer since the oldest times.
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http://www.toolan.com/hitler/append9.html
Die gegenwrtige Kundgebung soll darum unserm Fhrer den tiefen Dank dafr vor aller Welt zum Ausdruck bringen. Heute ist die Bahn fr Rassenhygiene frei. Allein wir haben gerade nur die ersten Schrittchen auf ihr gemacht und es sind noch viele, viele Schritten zu gehen, bis wesentliche Ziele der Rassenhygiene erreicht sind. Rassenhygiene ist keine Modesache, sondern sie mu ein Volk stndig begleiten, damit es immer auf der Hhe bleibt. Und diesen Weg unseres Volkes, unserer Rasse in die Zukunft nach rassenhygienischen Gesichtspunkten zu organisieren das Volk mit all dem Rstwerk, all dem geistigen und moralischen Proviant zu versehen, den es fr seine schicksalsbestimmende Reise braucht, ist, im Verein mit anderen Organisationen und mit der Gesetzgebung, die Aufgabe der Deutschen Gesellschaft fr Rassenhygiene, die durch das Verdienst des Herrn Reichsministers Dr. Frick im vlkischen Sinne neu organisiert dasteht. Rdin once again...
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Original Text
Angesichts dieser Laufbahn hat es Rdin nicht an wohlverdienten Ehrungen gefehlt, so erhielt er noch jngst vom Fhrer die Goethe-Medaille fr Kunst und Wissenschaft "In Anerkennung seiner Verdienste um die Entwicklung der deutschen Rassenhygiene". Der Reichsminister des Innern Dr. Frick bersandte ihm das folgende Glckwunschtelegramm: "Dem unermdlichen Vorkmpfer der Rassenhygiene und verdienstvollen Wegbereiter fr die rassenhygienischen Manahmen des Dritten Reiches sende ich zum 65 Geburtstage meine herzlichsten Glckwnsche. Mge es ihnen noch recht lange vergnnt sein, Ihre Forschung zum Wohl der Menschheit weiterzufhren". Die Wiesbadener Tagung der Deutschen Psychiater, Neurologen und Internisten verlieh ihm die Erb-Medaille.
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progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity. By that I mean that we cannot help so effectively if speaking for a National Council or any other body as we can when we make a more subtle approach adapted to the particular circumstances of the moment. It really wouldn't matter if no one ever heard of this Council again provided that the work was done. Let us all, therefore, very secretly be "fifth columnists". At the same time, however, there is no reason why we should not as individuals and in small groups make use of a perfectly open approach to the question of mental health. We have all of us got contacts with men and women who are concerned with the various aspects of life that I have just been mentioning and we could most of us get together small groups for informal discussions on these topics, and out of this might grow definite bodies or committees of persons interested in each of these fields of work, being convinced that it was worth while to work out their own specific problems and their own plans. While a central office can sometimes help in a project such as this, only the determined work that we as individuals can put in will ever provide the dynamic for such activities. In this field, as in every other, we ought to be thinking ahead and foreseeing events so far as that is possible. We have often been too spasmodic in our work and I feel we need a long-term plan of propaganda. The time is past when we need be in any way apologetic for directing people's interest to questions of mental health. Practically everybody is ready for such ideas. They were before the war, and it is far truer now than it was then. I doubt the wisdom of a direct attack upon the existing state of affairs; even though there is a war on, that would still raise opposition, whereas the more insidious approach of suggesting that something better is needed-"why shouldn't we try so and so"-is more likely to succeed. The evolutionary process is essentially British, and I think that we should make it a fundamental in our propaganda plan. Parliament, the Press and other publications, are the most obvious ways by which our propaganda can be got across, and it needs the thought and work of every one of us to get this going. Medical Members of Parliament are always ready to help with any well thought out plan of campaign which is clearly for the good of the country, but we need not limit ourselves to them. There are many energetic men in Parliament who are very willing when properly coached with questions and supplementaries, to ask them, and to follow up by personal contact to make sure that points of importance are adequately dealt with. I still live in the hope that some day we shad get Members of Parliament to submit themselves to personality and efficiency tests, for I feel sure that if they did they would then insist upon an candidates for Parliament going through the same elementary routine, and we might later have some chance of its being applied to the Civil Service! In the past we have made sporadic attempts to provide a Press service which can give statements on matters of topical interest and explain to the reporters, and through them to the public, the meaning of various phenomena which are "hot news" in our morning papers. Actually we have as a group not nearly enough alertness and enthusiasm about this matter of helping the Press and so influencing the times in which we live. Every one of us reads papers and journals but we are often too inert to take action about the points which should so obviously be taken up, whether the subject be politics, local government, social affairs or the decisions of the courts. Whether it be in matters of religion or those of home life, there are points which arise in the papers every day, in some of which we should interest ourselves. The policy of the Press, like that of the B.B.C., is affected by the size of its fan-mail. Even if our letters are not published, they still produce their effect upon the editorial mend, and some of them certainly wig be published and in this way will make people think. Here again we had probably better be secretive and not mention this Council or any other body, but simply write or speak as individuals. Don t let us mention Mental Hygiene (with capital letters), though we can safely write in terms of mental health and commonsense. When we do write it is important to remember that the understatement of a case is much more likely to be effective than its overstatement. Your attention must not be confined merely to the Daily Press, for there are innumerable weekly and monthly journals and special professional and trade papers, and it is as a rule much easier to get articles, notes, comments or letters-into these papers than into the Daily Press. Orate often, also, they are more
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carefully read than the daily paper. I should like to see us go beyond these more obvious points and set out on a campaign to get certain points and ideas which are of importance stressed by well known novelists in their books. Priestley, Morgan, Walpole, and a score of others whose books have a wide appeal-even Dr. Cronin-might be wining to co-operate. I am not suggesting, of course, that they should write propaganda novels it would be surprising if those had any circulation, but in an ordinary human story it should not be difficult to give some emphasis on a point of view, and the gradual building up of a series of such emphases over a period of years would be the soundest kind of propaganda. This Council has recently been co-operating in some experiments with films, and there the same idea has been emphasised that just one point can be got across to the public through this medium. Those of you who know books and their authors, and films and their makers, might be doing some long term planning of the right kind of propaganda. I have said several times that I believe we should be careful about the mention of the Council or any other body which might be thought to be furthering some particular point. Many people don't like to be "saved", "changed" or made healthy. I have a feeling, however, that "efficiency and economy" would make rather a good appeal because there are very few people who would not welcome these two suggestions. It has even crossed my mind whether we ought not to have a subsidiary company caned the Social Efficiency Board and get Mr. Bevin or someone like that in as Chairman! It seems to me that in approaching national matters, local government and social affairs we should be on much stronger ground if we were constantly stressing our interest in efficiency and economy, and certainly we can "sell" mental health under these headings as well as under any other. Oldham and Bristol, and possibly one or two other places, have their own committees or councils for mental health, and this is, I behove, an extremely wise move. Government in this country is bung de-centralised in many ways during the war, and for our particular work I believe that the more we can spread the responsibility the better win be our progress. These matters of man s mind and outlook are sufficiently vital and interesting to attract in every area groups of intelligent men and women who wig take on the function of local councils or committees. Let us learn from the Oxford Group and have week-end parties; all over the country we have people to our hand, medical students, teachers, journalists, civil servants, trades union officials, and an sorts of other people, whom we might get together and amongst whom we should find sensible, balanced people who could lead in local activities. Provided we have one such stable person in any group I should feel quite happy in giving that group its head. We all make mistakes, and no doubt it would drop some bricks but on the whole it would stir up interest of the right kind and advance our cause. I have in this article merely been feeling around in this vast field of policy. I have touched on a few pouts hoping to stimulate people to think of many more, and particularly of those that are within their own particular powers to follow up. I would like to close with fresh emphasis on the fact that we each of us as individuals carry a great responsibility for the mental health of the nation, now during the war and in the much better future that must come. We need vision and courage. We mustn't merely plan and be theorists, but we must also experiment, and it is worth remembering that in a time like this it is much easier to spread sensible ideas or, if you like, to teach in a quiet way, than it ever has been before. "It all depends on me" is quite a good slogan, and Mr. Morrison's "Go to it" is yet another of the dynamic sayings of the moment. We can apply both of these to ourselves in this particular field of work. In view of the coming defeat of Germany, Rees updates the plan. A new social entrance is needed. *Summary of an address given at the Annual Meeting of the National Council for Mental Hygiene on June 18th, 1940.
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Vorwort
Solange es unheilbar leidende, unter Schmerzen sterbende Menschen gibt, wird das Problem der "Euthanasie" zur Diskussion stehen. Die Organisation unseres modernen Lebens, die aus mancherlei Grnden Krankheit und Tod aus dem Familienbereich herausgerckt hat, mag vielen die willkommene Mglichkeit bieten, die hier aufbrechenden Fragen zu verdrngen. Damit hat man sie aber noch nicht aus der Welt geschafft und nur der Arzt, der sich ihnen am Sterbebett seiner Patienten nicht entziehen kann, wird in seinen Entscheidungen allein gelassen. Die "Verdrngung" des Euthanasie-Problems hat ihrer Grnde jedoch nicht nur in der - menschlich begreiflichen - Tendenz vieler unserer Mitbrger, das Leiden ihrer Angehrigen nicht in seiner ganzen Schrecklichkeit mitzuerleben und dazu eine verantwortliche Stellung zu beziehen: Das Wort "Euthanasie" weckt auch die Erinnerung an die Ttung Kranker oder Migebildeter whrend der nationalsozialistischen Machtperiode, die man nicht gerne ins Gedchtnis zurckruft. Deshald geht man in der Regel all diesen Fragen aus dem Weg. Selbst dort, wo sie auf breiter Basis zu einem die ffentlichkeit beschftigenden Thema werden, wie etwa bei der Ttung migebildeter Neugeborener in jngster Zeit, steht ihrer sachlichen Errterung hufig die "unbewltigte Vergangenheit" im Wege. Deshalb wird auch bei solchen konkreten Fllen entweder ein Teil der Problematik einfach auer Acht gelassen oder sie werden sogar unter Verwischung der jeweiligen Sachlage zu Rechtfertigungsversuchen fr die Schuld der Vergangenheit herangezogen. Angesichts dieser Scheu, die Dinge beim Namen zu nennen und ihnen in die Augen zu sehen, wirkt eine umfassende und objektive Darstellung, wie Professor Ehrhardt sie in diesem Buche gibt, befreiend: Indem er nicht nur zunchst die Begriffe klar umreit, sondern auch den historischen Ablauf der "Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens" im Dritten Reich schildert, ffnet er den Weg zu einer Bewltigung dieser Vergangenheit, ohne die eine weitere ernste Auseinandersetzung mit den Problemen der rztlichen Ethik einfach nicht mglich ist. Da Ehrhardt Vielschichtigkeit der hier zur Diskussion stehenden Fragen durch eine mehrdimensionale Betrachtungsweise Rechnung trgt, gewinnt seine Darstellung einer bisher auf diesem Gebiete nie zuvor erreichte Plastizitt. Deshalb wird dieses Buch nicht nur dem Studenten und Arzt, der eben wegen der Scheu vor diesem Thema hier in seinen Entscheidungen allein gelassen wird, von groer Hilfe sein, sondern auch jeden, der sich ernstlich mit der menschlichen Existenz auseinandersetzt, zur verantwortlichen Stellungnahme auch diesen Fragen gegenber aufrufen. Prof. Dr. Hans Hoff Vorstand der Psychiatrisch-Neurologischen Universittsklinik Wien Hoff's Preface to the book "Euthanasia and the Destruction of 'Life Unworthy' Life" by Helmut Ehrhardt.
Foreword
This item was not translated in the original book "The Men Behind Hitler". It is in the process of being translated.
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Natrlich sind es nicht neue Ideen, die Hitler hier vertritt. Aus welchen Quellen er geschpft hat, hat er nicht angegeben, vermutlich mit bewuter Absicht; denn ein wissenschaftliches Werk mit Quellenbelegen hat nun einmal nicht eine politische Massenwirkung, wie sie ein Schriftsteller erreichen kann, der im Stile des Propheten schreibt. "Einige Wendungen erinnern an uerungen Nietzsches, der im "Willen zur Macht" Absatz 734 u. a. sagt: "Es gibt Flle, wo ein Kind ein Verbrechen sein wrde." "Zuletzt hat hier die Gesellschaft eine Pflicht zu erfllen: es gibt wenige dergestalt dringliche und grundstzliche Forderungen an sie. Die Gesellschaft als Gromandatar des Lebens hat jedes verfehlte Leben vor dem Leben selber zu
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verantworten, - sie hat es auch zu ben: folglich soll sie es verhindern. Die Gesellschaft soll in zahlreichen Fllen der Zeugung vorbeugen: sie darf hierzu, ohne Rcksicht auf Herkunft, Rang und Geist, die hrtesten Zwangsmaregeln, Freiheitsentziehungen, unter Umstnden Kastrationen in Bereitschaft halten." Von eigentlich rassenhygienischen Bchern hat Hitler, wie ich hre, die zweite Auflage des Baur-Fischer-Lenz gelesen, und zwar whrend seiner Festungshaft in Landsberg. Manche Stellen daraus spiegeln sich in Wendungen Hitlers wieder. Jedenfalls hat er die wesentlichen Gedanke der Rassenhygiene und ihre Bedeutung mit groer geistiger Empfnglichkeit und Energie sich zu eigen gemacht, whrend die meisten akademischen Autoritten diesen Fragen noch ziemlich verstndnislos gegenberstehen. Es ist berhaupt erstaunlich, wie Hitler, der nur eine Realschule besucht hat, sich unter schwierigen Verhltnissen durch privates Bcherstudium jene Bildung hat aneignen knnen, die aus seinem Buche spricht. ber die Mglichkeiten der Rassenhygiene urteilt er zusammenfassend folgendermaen: "Eine nur sechshundertjhrige Verhinderung der Zeugungsfhigkeit und Zeugungsmglichkeit seitens krperlich Degenerierter und geistig Erkrankter wrde die Menschheit nicht nur von einem unermelichen Unglck befreien, sondern zu einer Gesundung beitragen, die heute kaum fabar erscheint. Wenn so die bewute planmige Frderung der Fruchtbarkeit der gesndesten Trger des Volkstums verwicklicht wird, so wird das Ergebnis eine Rasse sein, die, zunchst wenigstens, die Keime unseres heutigen krperlichen und damit auch geistigen Verfalls wieder ausgeschieden haben wird" (S. 448). Die einschrnkenden Worte "zunchst wenigstens" sollen offenbar besagen, da die Gesundung der Erbmasse des Volkes die nchste und dringendste Aufgabe ist. Darber hinaus aber hlt Hitler auch die Frderung besonders hochwertiger rassischer Elemente fr angezeigt. Er meint: "Denn hat erst ein Volk und ein Staat diesen Weg einmal beschritten, dann wird sich auch von selbst das Augenmerk darauf richten, gerade den rassisch wertvollsten Kern des Volkes und gerade seine Fruchtbarkeit zu steigern, um endlich das gesamte Volkstum des Segens eines hochgezchteten Rassengutes teilhaftig werden zu lassen" (S. 448, hnlich auch S. 493). "Ein Staat, der im Zeitalter der Rassenvergiftung sich der Pflege seiner besten rassischen Elemente widmet, mu eines Tages zum Herrn der Erde werden" (S. 782). Hitler hat anscheinend auch eine besondere Frderung nordischer Rassenelemente im Auge. Der Begriff "Nordische Rasse" kommt zwar, soviel ich sehe, in dem Buche nicht vor; an zahlreichen Stellen preist er aber die "Arier", denen er als Gegenpol die Juden gegenberstellt. Die Juden werden - zweifellos zu einseitig und in bertriebener Weise - fr fast alle Zersetzungserscheinungen der Gegenwart verantwortlich gemacht. Dem Juden fehlen nach Hitler "jene Eigenschaften, die schpferisch und damit kulturell begnadete Rassen auszeichnen"; sie besitzen "keine irgendwie kulturbildende Kraft" (S. 332). Die Vortrefflichkeit des "Ariers" erstrahlt im Vergleich zu diesem dunklen Hintergrunde in um so hellerem Licht. "Alles, was wir heute auf dieser Erde bewundern - Wissenschaft und Kunst, Technik und Erfindungen -, ist nur das schpferische Produkt weniger Vlker und vielleicht ursprnglich einer Rasse. Von ihnen hngt auch der Bestand dieser ganzen Kultur ab. Gehen sie zugrunde, so sinkt mit ihnen die Schnheit dieser Erde ins Grab." "Alle groen Kulturen der Vergangenheit gingen nur zugrunde, weil die ursprnglich schpferische Rasse an Blutsvergiftung abstarb" (S. 316). "Die Rassenfrage gibt nicht nur den Schlssel zur Weltgeschichte, sondern auch zur menschlichen Kultur berhaupt" (S. 372). Hitler ist offenbar stark von H. St. Chamberlain beeinflut worden, indirekt vielleicht auch von Gobineau, der zwar auch die Juden nicht liebte, ihnen aber doch mehr gerecht wurde. Auch von Th. Fritsch hat er anscheinend manche Ansichten bernommen. Ein Einflu Gnthers auf Hitlers Buch ist weniger deutlich; doch ist anzunehmen, da er auch Gnther gelesen hat. Wie Gobineau und Chamberlain bertreibt Hitler die schdlichen Folgen der Rassenkreuzung. "Die Blutvermischung und das dadurch bedingte Senken des Rassenniveaus ist die alleinige Ursache des Absterbens alter Kulturen; denn die Menschen gehen nicht an verlorenen Kriegen zugrunde, sondern am Verlust jener Widerstandskraft, die nur dem reinen Blute zu eigen ist" (S. 324, hnlich auch S. 442 und 443). An anderen Stellen zeigt er freilich auch Verstndnis fr die Hemmung der Auslese als Entartungsursache (z. B. S. 145) und fr die wirklich entscheidende Ursache des Niedergangs, die Gegenauslese, z. B. auf S. 582 und 583, wo er von der Auslesewirkung des Krieges spricht. Die grundlegende Bedeutung der Auslese fr die Gestaltung der Rassen und Arten wird auf S. 144/145 und S. 313 betont. An sich ist es gewi richtig, da die Rassenhygiene sich die Erhaltung und Frderung jener
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Rassenelemente, die unsere Kultur geschaffen haben, angelegen sein lassen mu. "Somit ist der hchste Zweck des vlkischen Staates die Sorge um die Erhaltung derjenigen rassischen Urelemente, die, als kulturspendend, die Schnheit und Wrde eines hheren Menschentums schaffen" (S. 434). Es kommt aber sehr darauf an, wie "der Versuch, die innerhalb der Volksgemeinschaft als rassisch besonders wertvoll erkannten Elemente mageblichst zu frdern und fr ihre besondere Vermehrung Sorge zu tragen" (S. 493), praktisch durchzufhren gesucht wird. Hitler denkt an Siedlungskolonien, "deren Bewohner ausschlielich Trger hchster Rassenreinheit und damit hchster Rassentchtigkeit sind" (S. 449). "Eigens gebildete Rassekommissionen haben den einzelnen das Siedlungsattest auszustellen; diese aber ist gebunden an eine festzulegende bestimmte rassische Reinheit" (S. 448). Nun es ist aber in einer gemischten Bevlkerung wie der unsrigen nicht mglich, nach ueren Merkmalen die Zugehrigkeit des wesentlichen Teils der Erbmasse festzustellen. Blondes Haar verbrgt nicht edle Rasse und dunkles schliet sie nicht aus. In bezug auf die soziale Auslese bemerkt Hitler treffend: "Diese Siebung nach Fhigkeit und Tchtigkeit kann nicht mechanisch vorgenommen werden, sondern ist eine Arbeit, die der Kampf des tglichen Lebens ununterbrochen besorgt" (S. 493). Diese Bewhrung im tglichen Leben ist meines Erachtens auch der beste Matab fr die rassenhygienische Auslese. Natrlich darf auch nicht etwa das Parteibuch als Matab der Tchtigkeit genommen werden. Ein Beispiel rassischen Niedergangs ist fr Hitler das ihm auch sonst unsympathische Frankreich. Dieses macht nach Hitler "in seiner Vernegerung so rapide Fortschritte, da man tatschlich von einer Entstehung eines afrikanischen Staates auf europischem Boden reden kann" (S. 730). Mag das auch bertrieben erscheinen, die Gefahr, welche direkt fur Frankreich und indirekt fr ganz Europa droht, ist doch grundstzlich richtig gesehen. Wenn er von dem "nicht nur in seiner Volkszahl, sondern besonders in seinen rassisch besten Elementen absterbenden Franzosentum " spricht (S. 766), so scheint er allerdings bei der Niederschrift dieses Satzes sich nicht bewut gewesen zu sein, da die gegenwrtige Kinderzahl des deutschen Volkes noch weniger zur Erhaltung ausreicht als die des franzsischen. Hitler setzt sich energisch fr die Sterilisierung Minderwertiger ein. "Die Forderung, da defekten Menschen die Zeugung anderer ebenso defekter Nachkommen unmglich gemacht wird, ist eine Forderung klarster Vernunft und bedeutet in ihrer planmigen Durchfhrung die humanste Tat der Menschheit. Sie wird Millionen von Unglcklichen unverdiente Leiden ersparen, in der Folge aber zu einer steigenden Gesundung berhaupt fhren" (S. 279). Aus der Tatsache, da er von Millionen von Unglcklichen spricht, folgt, da er die Sterilisierung nicht nur fr extreme Flle fordert, was fr die Gesundung der Rasse ziemlich bedeutungslos sein wrde, sondern sie auf den gesamten minderwertigen Teil der Bevlkerung erstreckt wissen will. Er wei auch die Bedeutung frher Eheschliessung in ihrer ganzen Tragweite zu wrdigen. "Freilich ist zu ihrer Ermglichung eine ganze Reihe von sozialen Voraussetzungen ntig, ohne die an eine frhe Verehelichung gar nicht zu denken ist" (S. 276). Er sieht durchaus ein, da eine Lsung dieser Frage nicht ohne einschneidende soziale Manahmen mglich ist. Man darf also hoffen, da die nationalsozialistische Bewegung sich tatkrftig fr einen Ausgleich der Familienlasten einsetzen wird. Treffend sind auch die Bemerkungen ber die Steigerung der Lebensansprche, die eine Hauptursache bermiger Geburtenbeschrnkung ist. "Die Anforderungen der Menschen in bezug auf Nahrung und Kleidung werden von Jahr zu Jahr grer und stehen schon jetzt zum Beispiel in keinem Verhltnis mehr zu den Bedrfnissen unserer Vorfahren etwa vor 100 Jahren" (S. 146). Da die Steigerung der Ansprche zum guten Teil durch den Aufwand der Kinderlosen bedingt ist, wrde ein wirksamer Ausgleich der Familienlasten, die bermige Steigerung der Ansprche zurckzuschrauben geeignet sein. "Sicherlich wird zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt die gesamte Menschheit gezwungen sein, infolge der Unmglichkeit, die Fruchtbarkeit des Bodens der weitersteigenden Volkszahl noch lnger anzugleichen, die Vermehrung des menschlichen Geschlechts einzustellen" (S. 147). Einem Volk, das mit der Einstellung der Fortpflanzung vorangeht, wird aber das Dasein auf dieser Welt genommen (S. 145). Eine wichtige Voraussetzung fr die Erhaltung der rassenmigen Grundlagen unseres Volkstums ist eine in diesem Sinne gestaltete Erziehung. "Die gesamte Bildungs- und Erziehungsarbeit des vlkischen Staates mu ihre Krnung darin finden, da sie den Rassesinn und das Rassegefhl instinkt- und verstandesmig in Herz und Gehirn der ihr anvertrauten Jugend hineinbrennt" (S. 475). "Das Ziel der weiblichen
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Erziehung hat unverrckbar die kommende Mutter zu sein" (S. 460). Das jugendliche Gehirn soll im allgemeinen nicht mit Dingen belastet werden, die es zu 95 Prozent nicht braucht (S. 464). Der franzsische Sprachunterricht sollte von den hheren Schulen entfernt werden (S. 465). Im Geschichtsunterricht sollte eine wesentliche Krzung des Stoffes vorgenommen werden (S. 467); in der Geschichte kommt der Rassenfrage die dominierende Stellung zu (S. 468). Wenn der berflssige und daher schdliche Bildungswust von der Schule entfernt werden wrde, so wrde, wie ich hinzufgen mchte, es auch mglich sein, die gesamte Dauer der hheren Schule um zwei Jahre zu krzen, was im Hinblick auf die Ermglichung frherer Eheschlieung dringend erwnscht wre. Eine ebenso wichtige Aufgabe des Bildungswesens, wie die Erziehung es ist, ist die soziale Auslese oder, wie Hitler sich ausdrckt, "die Menschenauslese an sich" (S. 477). Der vlkische Staat hat "nicht die Aufgabe, einer bestehenden Gesellschaftsklasse den magebenden Einfluss zu wahren, sondern die Aufgabe, aus der Summe aller Volksgenossen die fhigsten Kpfe herauszuholen und zu Amt und Wrden zu bringen" (S. 480). Der Rassenhygieniker mu aber darauf dringen, da die fhigen Kpfe nicht wie bisher eben durch ihren Aufstieg dem Aussterben zugefhrt werden. Hitler ist der Gedanke unertrglich, "da alljhrlich Hunderttausende vollstndig talentlose Menschen einer hheren Ausbildung gewrdigt werden, whrend andere Hunderttausende von groer Begabung ohne jede hhere Ausbildung bleiben" (S. 479). ber die Hufigkeit hoher geistiger Begabung in den unteren Schichten scheint sich Hitler allerdings zu optimistische Vorstellungen zu machen. Hier wre auf die Feststellungen Hartnackes hinzuweisen (Naturgrenzen geistiger Bildung, Leipzig 1930). Im brigen scheut Hitler sich nicht, auch unpopulre Wahrheiten auszusprechen. So bemerkt er zur Alkoholfrage: "Wenn z. B. ein ganzer Kontinent der Alkoholvergiftung endlich den Kampf ansagt, um ein Volk aus den Klammern dieses verheerenden Lasters herauszulsen, dann hat unsere europische brgerliche Welt dafr nichts brig als ein nichtssagendes Glotzen und Kopfschtteln, ein berlegenes Lcherlichfinden - das sich bei dieser lcherlichen Gesellschaft besonders gut ausnimmt" (S. 450). Auch sonst nennt er die Dinge oft beim rechten Namen: "Unser gesamtes ffentliches Leben gleicht heute einem Treibhaus sexueller Vorstellungen und Reize. Man betrachte doch den Speisezettel unserer Kinos, Variets und Theater, und man kann wohl kaum leugnen, da dies nicht die richtige Kost, vor allem fr die Jugend, ist" (S. 278). Auch die Auenpolitik mu das Ziel haben, "die Existenz der durch den Staat zusammengefaten Rasse sicherzustellen" (S. 728). Wenn Deutschland im Jahre 1904 die Rolle Japans bernommen htte, so wre einem Weltkriege vorgebeugt gewesen. "Das Blut im Jahre 1904 htte das zehnfache der Jahre 1914 bis 1918 erspart" (S. 155). Dazu war die Freundschaft Englands ntig. Es war daher auf Kolonien und Seegeltung zu verzichten; die gesamten Machtmittel des Staates waren auf das Landheer zu konzentrieren (S. 154, hnlich auch S. 753). Der sogenannte "Risikogedanke" von Tirpitz wird als grundfalsch bezeichnet (S. 300). "Ich gestehe offen, da ich schon in der Vorkriegszeit es fr richtiger gehalten htte, wenn sich Deutschland, unter Vorsicht auf die unsinnige Kolonialpolitik und unter Verzicht auf Handelsund Kriegsflotte, mit England im Bunde gegen Ruland gestellt htte und damit von der schwachen Allerweltspolitik zu einer entschlossenen europischen Politik kontinentalen Bodenerwerbe bergegangen wre" (S. 753). Ich kann diesen Ausfhrungen nur zustimmen; und ich habe mich verschiedentlich im gleichen Sinne geuert (z.b. B.-F.-L. Bd. II S. 396/397). Hitler glaubt, da eine solche Politik auch in Zukunft wieder mglich sein werde; und er mchte in diesem Sinne dem deutschen Volk ein "politisches Testament" geben, ein groes Ziel, an dem die Auenpolitik unbeschadet der etwa ntigen Entscheidungen des Tages zu orientieren sei. "Wir stoppen den ewigen Germanenzug nach dem Sden und Westen Europas und weisen den Blick nach dem Land im Osten. Wir schlieen endlich ab die Kolonial- und Handelspolitik der Vorkriegszeit und gehen ber zur Bodenpolitik der Zukunft" (S. 742). Die Entwicklung der Weltwirtschaft in den Jahren, seit Hitler dies geschrieben hat, weist unser Volk in die gleiche Richtung. Wir werden einfach gezwungen sein, unsere Lebensgrundlage wieder vorwiegend auf dem Lande zu suchen. "Schon die Mglichkeit eines gesunden Bauernstandes als Fundament der gesamten Nation kann niemals hoch genug eingeschtzt werden. Viele unserer heutigen Leiden sind nur die Folge des ungesunden Verhltnisses zwischen Land- und Stadtvolk" (S. 157).
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Aus einer solchen Politik wrde sich auch ganz von selbst, von selbst eine Interessengemeinschaft der groen germanischen Vlker ergeben, die nicht nur aus ideellen Grnden anzustreben ist, sondern die aus dem wohlverstandenen Lebensinteresse der einzelnen germanischen Vlker folgt. "Man darf sich nicht durch Verschiedenheiten der einzelnen Vlker die grere Rassegemeinschaft zerreien lassen. Der Kampf, der heute tobt, geht um ganz groe Ziele: eine Kultur kmpft um ihr Dasein, die Jahrtausende in sich verbindet und Griechen- und Germanentum gemeinsam umschliet" (S. 470). Hitler wendet sich scharf gegen die Forderung der Wiederherstellung der deutschen Grenzen von 1914, die er als einen politischen Unsinn von Ausmaen und Folgen bezeichnet, die ihn als Verbrechen erscheinen lassen. Auch abgesehen von dem Umstande, da zu einer solchen Politik die Machtmittel fehlen, wrde sie, selbst wenn sie erfolgreich wre, zu einer weiteren Ausblutung unseres Volkskrpers fhren, die nicht verantwortet werden knnte (S. 739). Insbesondere auf Sdtirol mu ganz bewut verzichtet werden, da wir die Freundschaft Italiens ebensowenig wie die Englands entbehren knnen. Im Hinblick auf die Mglichkeit knftiger Kriege sagt Hitler: "Eine Diplomatie hat dafr zu sorgen, da ein Volk nicht heroisch zugrunde geht, sondern praktisch erhalten wird" (S. 693). "Wir schwrmen auch heute noch von einem Heroismus, der unserem Volke Millionen seiner edelsten Bluttrger raubte, im Endergebnis jedoch vollkommen unfruchtbar blieb" (S. 735). Heute vollends seien die Machtmittel des Deutschen Reiches so jmmerlich, da ein Kampf gegen Frankreich nur den Charakter eines Abschlachtens der deutschen Jugend haben wrde; und das Endergebnis wre die unabwendbare Niederlage und das Ende des Deutschen Reiches. In einem knftigen Kriege wird die technische Rstung mehr als die Zahl der Soldaten entscheidend sein (S. 748). Durch diesen Satz wird gewissermaen ein frherer richtiggestellt, in dem Hitler von der Wiedergewinnung uerer Macht sagt: "Die Voraussetzungen hierzu sind aber nicht, wie unsere brgerlichen `Staatsmnner' immer herumschwtzen, Waffen, sondern Krfte des Willens" (S. 365). In dieser Hinsicht haben die "brgerlichen" Staatsmnner eben doch nicht so unrecht gehabt. Und sie hatten insbesondere recht gegenber dem Hitler von 1923, der das vergessen hatte. Wenn Hitler damals grere Anfangserfolge gehabt htte, so htte Frankreich sich die Gelegenheit zum Abschieen des Restes der deutschen Jugend nicht entgehen lassen und sein auch von Hitler als solches gekennzeichnetes Ziel erreicht, die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches. Man kann es gewi verstehen, da Hitlers nationale Begeisterung ihn damals zu einem Schritte hingerissen hat, den er schwerlich getan htte, wenn er "die Vernunft als alleinige Fhrerin" htte gelten lassen, wie er auf S. 753 als Grundsatz ausspricht. Vermutlich wei er heute selber, da es fr den Bestand des Reiches besser war, da die Erhebung damals gleich in den Anfngen unterdrckt wurde. Gewi mu ein Krebskranker eine Operation wagen, auch wenn nur ein halbes Prozent Aussicht auf Erfolg besteht (S. 463); Hitler selbst aber wird zugeben, da die Aussichten auf Rettung von Reich und Volk heute besser sind als im Jahre 1923 und da begrndete Hoffnung besteht, da sie noch besser werden. Und er selber hat heute und in Zukunft bessere Aussichten, an dieser Rettung wesentlich mitzuwirken als damals. Hitlers Fhigkeit der suggestiven Beeinflussung von Massen ist bewunderswert. ber die Mittel und Wege der Massenbeeinflussung spricht er mit erstaunlicher Offenheit. "Die Propaganda ist in Inhalt und Form auf die breite Masse anzusetzen, und ihre Richtigkeit ist ausschlielich zu messen an ihrem wirksamen Erfolg" (S. 376). "Solange die Einsicht der Masse so gering bleibt wie jetzt und der Staat so gleichgltig wie heute, wird diese Masse stets dem am ersten folgen, der in wirtschaftlichen Dingen zunchst die unverschmtesten Versprechungen bietet" (S. 354). Gift werede nur durch Gegengift berwunden. Man darf annehmen, da Hitler genau wei, da ein Volk auch von Gegengift nicht leben kann. "Die Rede eines Staatsmanns zu seinem Volk habe ich nicht zu messen nach dem Eindruck, den sie bei einem Universittsprofessor hinterlt, sondern an der Wirkung, die sie auf das Volk ausbt" (S. 534). Diese Umstandes wird man stets eingedenk sein Mseen, wenn man gewisse Auslassungen Hitlers ber wirtschaftliche Forderungen, ber Mglichkeiten der Auenpolitik und auch ber die Judenfrage liest, ber die man manchmal den Kopf schttelt ...... Arkhiv f. Rassen- und Ges.-Biol. Bd. 25, Heft 3.
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